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COLOUR  STUDIES  IN  PARIS 


Works  by  Arthur  Symons 

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New  York 


Portrait  of  Mallarme  by  Whistler 


COLOUR  STUDIES 
IN  PARIS 


BY 

ARTHUR  SYMONS 

AUTHOR  OF 

Plays,  Acting  and  Music,"  "  Studies  in  Seven  Arts," 
"  Ttie  Symbolist  Movement  in  Literature,"  etc. 


/> 


ILLUSTRATBD  WITH  PORTRAITS 
SIGNATURES   AND  RARB   CARTOONS 


NEW  YORK 

E.  P.  DUTTON  &  COMPANY 
68 1  Fifth  Avenue 


Copyright,  1918 
By  E.  P.  DUTTON  &  COMPANY 


All  rights  reserved 


Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

Paris 3 

The  Gingerbread  Fair  at  Vincennes      .      .  5 

montmartre  and  the  latin  quarter      .      .  25 

Paris  and  Ideas 43 

The  Poet  of  the  Bats 55 

Songs  of  the  Streets 67 

A  Book  of  French  Verses 77 

At  the  Ambassadors 89 

YVETTE   GUILBERT .91 

La  Melinite:  Moulin-Rouge 105 

Dancers  and  Dancing 107 

Leon  Bloy:  The  Thankless  Beggar       .      .121 

Victor  Hugo  and  Words 131 

A  Tragic  Comedy 147 

Petrus  Borel 157 

v 


vi  CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Notes  on  Paris  and  Paul  Verlaine: 

The  Absinthe-Drinker 189 

At  the  Cafe  Francois  Premier  .       .       .191 

The  Man 197 

Bonheur      .  205 

Epigrammes 215 

Confessions 219 

Dedicaces 223 

Invectives  .       .       .      .      .      .      .       .231 

A  Prince  of  Court  Painters      ....  239 

Odilon  Redon 251 


LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 


PAGE 

Portrait  of  Mallarme  by  Wh'stler         .       Frontispiece 

Quartier  Latin,     ioa.  m 26 

Quartier  Latin.     5  p.  m 30 

Quartier  Latin.     2  a.  m 36 

Le  Rat  Mort 38 

Invitation  Card,  Le  Rat  Mort     ....  39 

Cartoon  of  Jean  Moreas 44 

Facsimile  of  Letter  from  Montesquiou        .        .  56 

Aristide  Bruant 68 

Newspaper,  "Le  Mirliton" 70 

Cartoon  of  Charles  Cros 78 

Yvette  Guilbert 96 

Poster.     Folies-Bergere  ......  108 

Victor  Hugo  as  a  Young  Man      ....  132 

Facsimile  of  Letter  from  Victor_Hugo        .       .  136 

Petrus  Borel 162 

Facsimile  of  Verlaine's  Signature  ....  198 

Cartoon  of  Arthur  Rimbaud        ....  202 

Paul  Verlaine 206 

Facsimile  of  Letter  from  Mallarm^     .       .       .  225 
Facsimile  of  Note  from  Redon     .       .       .       .251 

Odilon  Redon 254 

vii 


COLOUR  STUDIES  IN  PARIS 


PARIS 

My  Paris  is  a  land  where  twilight  days 
Merge  into  violent  nights  of  black  and  gold ; 
Where,  it  may  be,  the  flower  of  dawn  is  cold : 
Ah,  but  the  gold  nights,  and  the  scented  ways ! 

Eyelids  of  women,  little  curls  of  hair, 

A  little  nose  curved  softly,  like  a  shell, 

A  red  mouth  like  a  wound,  a  mocking  veil : 

Phantoms,  before  the  dawn,  how  phantom-fair ! 

And  every  woman  with  beseeching  eyes, 
Or  with  enticing  eyes,  or  amorous, 
Offers  herself,  a  rose,  and  craves  of  us 
A  rose's  place  among  our  memories. 
1894 


THE  GINGERBREAD  FAIR  AT 
VINCENNES 


The  tram  rolls  heavily  through  the  sun- 
shine, on  the  way  to  Vincennes.  The  sun 
beats  on  one's  head  like  the  glow  of  a 
furnace;  we  are  in  the  second  week  of  May, 
and  the  hour  is  between  one  and  two  in  the 
afternoon.  From  the  Place  Voltaire,  all 
along  the  dingy  boulevard,  there  are  signs  of 
the  fair;  first,  little  stalls,  with  the  refuse 
of  ironmonger  and  pastry-cook,  then  little 
booths,  then  a  few  roundabouts,  the  wooden 
horses  standing  motionless.  At  the  Place 
de  la  Nation  we  have  reached  the  fair  itself. 
Already  the  roundabouts  swarm  in  gor- 
geous inactivity :  shooting-galleries  with  lofty 

5 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


names — Tir  Metropolitan,  Tir  de  Lutece — 
lead  on  to  the  establishments  of  cochonnerie, 
the  gingerbread  pigs,  which  have  given  its 
name  to  the  Foire  au  pain  d'epice.  From 
between  the  two  pillars,  each  with  its  airy 
statue,  we  can  look  right  on,  through  lanes 
of  stalls  and  alleys  of  dusty  trees  to  the 
railway  bridge  which  crosses  the  other  end 
of  the  Cours  de  Vincennes,  just  before  it 
subsides  into  the  desolate  Boulevard  Soult 
and  the  impoverished  grass  of  the  ramparts. 
Hardly  anyone  passes :  the  fair,  which  is  up 
late,  sleeps  till  three.  I  saunter  slowly  along, 
watching  the  drowsy  attitudes  of  the  women 
behind  their  stalls,  the  men  who  lounge  be- 
side their  booths.  Only  the  photographer 
is  in  activity,  and  as  you  pause  a  moment 
to  note  his  collection  of  grimacing  and 
lachrymose  likenesses  (probably  very  like), 
a  framed  horror  is  thrust  into  your  hand, 
and  a  voice  insinuates:  Six  pour  un  sou, 
Monsieur! 

6 


THE     GINGERBREAD     FAIR     AT     VINCENNES 

To  stroll  through  the  fair  just  now  is  to 
have  a  sort  of  "Private  View."  The  hour 
of  disguises  has  not  yet  begun.  The  heavy- 
girl  who,  in  an  hour's  time,  will  pose  in  rosy 
tights  and  cerulean  tunic  on  those  trestles 
yonder  in  front  of  the  theatre,  sits  on  the 
ladder-staircase  of  her  "jivin  wardo,"  her 
"living  waggon,"  as  the  gipsies  call  it,  dili- 
gently mending,  with  the  help  of  scissors 
and  thread,  a  piece  of  canvas  which  is  soon 
to  be  a  castle  or  a  lake.  A  lion-tamer,  in 
his  shirt-sleeves  is  chatting  with  the  pro- 
prietress of  a  collection  of  waxworks.  A 
fairy  queen  is  washing  last  week's  tights  in 
a  great  tub.  And  booths  and  theatres  seem 
to  lounge  in  the  same  deshabille.  With  their 
vacant  platforms,  their  closed  doors,  their 
too  visible  masterpieces  of  coloured  canvas, 
they  stand,  ugly  and  dusty,  every  crack  and 
patch  exposed  by  the  pitiless  downpour  of 
the  sunlight.  Here  is  the  show  of  Pezon, 
the  old  lion-tamer,  who  is  now  assisted  by 

7 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

his  son;  opposite,  his  rival  and  constant 
neighbour,  Bidel.  The  Grand  Theatre 
Cocherie  announces  its  grand  f  eerie  in  three 
acts  and  twenty  tableaux.  A  concert  in- 
ternational succeeds  a  very  dismal-looking 
Temple  de  la  Gaiete.  Here  is  the  Theatre 
Macketti;  here  the  Grande  MusSe  Vivant; 
here  a  Galerie  artistique  at  one  sou. 
Laurent,  inimitable  dompteur  (pour  la 
premiere  fois  a  Paris)  has  for  companion 
Juliano  et  ses  fauves:  Fosse  aux  Lions. 
There  is  a  very  large  picture  of  a  Soudanese 
giant — il  est  ici,  le  geant  Soudanais;  2m  20 
de  hauteur — outside  a  very  small  tent;  the 
giant,  very  black  in  the  face,  and  very  red 
as  to  his  habiliments,  holds  a  little  black 
infant  in  the  palm  of  his  hand,  and  by  his 
side,  carefully  avoiding  (by  a  delicacy  of 
the  painter)  a  too  direct  inspection,  stands 
a  gendarme,  who  extends  five  fingers  in  a 
gesture  of  astonishment,  somewhat  out  of 
keeping  with  the  perfect  placidity  of  his 

8 


THE     GINGERBREAD     FAIR    AT     VINCENNES 

face.  Theatres  des  Illusions  flourish  side 
by  side  with  Musees  artistiques,  in  which 
the  latest  explosive  Anarchist,  or  Le  double 
crime  du  boulevard  du  Temple  is  the 
"great  attraction"  of  the  moment.  Highly- 
coloured  and  freely  designed  pictures  of 
nymphs  and  naiads  are  accompanied  by  such 
seductive  and  ingenuous  recommendations 
as  this,  which  I  copy  textually.  I  cannot 
reproduce  the  emphasis  of  the  lettering: 

Etoiles  Animees.  Filles  de  VAir.  Nou- 
velle  attraction  par  le  professeur  Julius. 
Pourquoi  Mile.  Isaure  est-elle  appelee 
Deesse  des  Eauxf  Cest  par  sa  grace  et 
son  pouvoir  mysterieux  de  paraitre  au 
milieu  des  Eaux  limpides,  devant  tons  les 
spectateurs  qui  deviendront  ses  Admira- 
teurs.  En  Plein  Theatre  la  belle  Isaure 
devient  Syr  hie  et  Nayade!  charme  par  ses 
jeux  sveltes  et  souples,  apparait  en  Plein 
Mer,  et  presentee  par  le  professeur  Julius 
a  chaque  representation.     Plusieurs  pales 

9 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

imitateurs  essayent  de  copier  la  belle  Isaure, 
mais  le  vrai  Public,  amateur  du  Vrais  et 
du  Beau,  dira  que  la  Copie  ne  vaut  pas 
I' original.  And  there  is  a  Jardin  mysterieux 
which  represents  an  improbable  harem,  with 
an  undesirable  accompaniment  of  perform- 
ing reptiles.  Before  this  tent  I  pause,  but 
not  for  the  sake  of  its  announcements;  in 
the  doorway  sits  a  beautiful  young  girl  of 
about  sixteen,  a  Jewess,  with  a  face  that 
Leonardo  might  have  painted.  A  red  frock 
reaches  to  her  knees,  her  thin  legs,  in  white 
tights,  are  crossed  nonchalantly :  in  her  black 
hair  there  is  the  sparkle  of  false  diamonds, 
ranged  in  a  tiara  above  the  gracious  contour 
of  her  forehead ;  and  she  sits  there,  motion- 
less, looking  straight  before  her  with  eyes 
that  see  nothing,  absorbed  in  some  vague 
reverie,  the  Monna  Lisa  of  the  Gingerbread 
Fair. 


10 


THE     GINGERBREAD     FAIR     AT    VINCENNES 


II 


It  is  half -past  three,  and  the  Cours  de 
Vincennes  is  a  carnival  of  colours,  sounds 
and  movements.  Looking  from  the  Place 
de  la  Nation,  one  sees  a  long  thin  line  of 
customers  along  the  stalls  of  bonbons  and 
gingerbread,  and  the  boulevard  has  the  air 
of  a  black-edged  sheet  of  paper,  until  the 
eye  reaches  a  point  where  the  shows  begin. 
Then  the  crowd  is  seen  in  black  patches, 
sometimes  large,  extending  half  across  the 
road,  sometimes  small;  every  now  and  then 
one  of  the  black  patches  thins  rapidly  as  the 
people  mount  the  platform,  or  there  is  a 
simultaneous  movement  from  one  point  of 
attraction  to  another.  At  one's  back  the 
roundabouts  are  squealing  the  repertoire 
Paalus,  in  front  there  is  a  continuous  deaf- 
ening rumble  of  drums,  with  an  inextricable 
jangle  and  jumble  of  brass  bands,  each  play- 

ii 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

ing  a  different  tune,  all  at  once,  and  all  close 
together.  Shrill  or  hoarse  voices  are  heard 
for  a  moment,  to  be  drowned  the  next  by 
the  intolerable  drums  and  cornets.  As  one 
moves  slowly  down  the  long  avenue,  dis- 
tracted by  the  cries,  the  sounds,  coming  from 
both  sides  at  once,  it  is  quite  another  aspect 
that  is  presented  by  those  dingy  platforms, 
those  gaping  canvases  of  but  an  hour  ago. 
Every  platform  is  alive  with  human  frip- 
pery. A  clown  in  reds  and  yellows,  with 
a  floured  and  rouged  face,  bangs  a  big 
drum,  an  orchestra  (sometimes  of  one, 
sometimes  of  fifteen)  "blows  through  brass" 
with  the  full  power  of  its  lungs;  fulgently 
and  scantily  attired  ladies  throng  the  fore- 
ground, a  man  in  plain  clothes  squanders 
the  remains  of  a  voice  in  howling  the  at- 
tractions of  the  interior,  and  in  the  back- 
ground, at  a  little  table,  an  opulent  lady  sits 
at  the  receipt  of  custom,  with  the  business- 
like solemnity  of  the  dame  du  comptoir  of 

12 


THE     GINGERBREAD     FAIR     AT    VINCENNES 

a  superior  restaurant.  Occasionally  there  is 
a  pas  seal,  more  often  an  indifferent  waltz, 
at  times  an  impromptu  comedy.  Outside 
Bidel's  establishment  a  tired  and  gentle 
dromedary  rubs  its  nose  against  the  pole 
to  which  it  is  tied;  elsewhere  a  monkey 
swings  on  a  trapeze;  a  man  addresses  the 
crowd  with  a  snake  about  his  shoulders,  and 
my  Monna  Lisa,  too,  has  twined  a  snake 
around  her,  and  stands  holding  the  little 
malevolent  head  in  her  fingers,  like  an  ex- 
quisite and  harmless  Medusa. 

Under  the  keen  sunlight  every  colour 
stands  out  sharply,  and  to  pass  between  those 
two  long  lines  of  gesticulating  figures  is  to 
plunge  into  an  orgy  of  clashing  colours. 
All  the  women  wear  the  coarsest  of  worsted 
tights,  the  usual  tint  of  which  is  intended 
to  be  flesh-colour  but  it  varies,  through  all 
the  shades,  from  the  palest  of  pink  to  the 
brightest  of  red.  Often  the  tights  are 
patched,    sometimes    they    are    not    even 

13 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

patched.  The  tunic  may  be  mauve,  or 
orange,  or  purple,  or  blue;  it  is  generally- 
open  in  front,  showing  a  close-fitting  jersey 
of  the  same  colour  as  the  tights.  The  arms 
are  bare,  the  faces,  as  a  rule,  made  up  with 
discretion  and  restraint.  There  is  one 
woman,  who  must  once  have  been  very  beau- 
tiful, who  appears  in  ballet  skirts;  there  is 
a  man  in  blue-grey  cloak  and  hood,  warriors 
in  plumes  and  cuirass ;  but  for  the  most  part 
it  is  the  damsels  in  flesh-coloured  tights  and 
jerseys  who  parade  on  the  platforms  outside 
the  theatres.  When  they  break  into  a  waltz 
it  is  always  the  most  dissonant  of  mauves, 
and  pinks,  and  purples  that  choose  one 
another  as  partners.  As  the  girls  move 
carelessly  and  clumsily  round  in  the  dance, 
they  continue  the  absorbing  conversations  in 
which  they  are  mostly  engaged.  Rarely 
does  anyone  show  the  slightest  interest  in 
the  crowd  whose  eyes  are  all  fixed — so 
thirstingly! — upon   them.     They   stand   or 

14 


THE     GINGERBREAD     FAIR     AT     VINCENNES 

move  as  they  are  told,  mechanically,  indif- 
ferently, and  that  is  all.  Often,  but  not 
always,  well-formed,  they  have  occasionally 
pretty  faces  as  well.  There  is  a  brilliant 
little  creature,  who  forms  one  of  the  crowd 
of  warriors  outside  the  Theatre  Cocherie, 
who  has  quite  an  individual  type  of  charm 
and  intelligence.  She  has  a  boyish  face, 
little  black  curls  on  her  forehead,  a  proud, 
sensitive  mouth,  and  black  eyes  full  of  wit 
and  defiance.  As  Miss  Angelina,  artiste 
gymnasiarque  equilibriste  et  dansense,  goes 
through  a  very  ordinary  selection  of  steps 
("rocks,"  "scissors,"  and  the  like,  as  they 
are  called  in  the  profession),  Julienne's  eyes 
devour  every  movement ;  she  is  learning  how 
to  do  it,  and  will  practise  it  herself  without 
telling  anyone,  until  she  can  surprise  them 
some  day  by  taking  Miss  Angelina's  place. 


15 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN  '  PARIS 


III 


But  it  is  at  night,  towards  nine  o'clock, 
that  the  fair  is  at  its  best.  The  painted 
faces,  the  crude  colours,  assume  their  right 
aspect,  become  harmonious,  under  the  arti- 
ficial light.  The  dancing  pinks  and  reds 
whirl  on  the  platforms,  flash  into  the  gas- 
light, disappear  for  an  instant  into  a  solid 
shadow,  against  the  light,  emerge  vividly. 
The  moving  black  masses  surge  to  and  fro 
before  the  booths;  from  the  side  one  sees 
lines  of  rigid  figures,  faces  that  the  light 
shows  in  eager  profile.  Outside  the  Theatre 
Cocherie  there  is  a  shifting  light  which  turns 
a  dazzling  glitter,  moment  by  moment,  across 
the  road ;  it  plunges  like  a  sword  into  one  of 
the  trees  opposite,  casts  a  glow  as  of  white 
fire  over  the  transfigured  green  of  leaves 
and  branches,  and  then  falls  off,  baffled  by 
the  impenetrable  leafage.    As  the  light  drops 

16 


THE     GINGERBREAD     FAIR     AT     VINCENNES 

suddenly  on  the  crowd,  an  instant  before 
only  dimly  visible,  it  throws  into  fierce  re- 
lief the  intent  eyes,  the  gaping  mouths,  the 
unshaven  cheeks,  darting  into  the  hollows 
of  broken  teeth,  pointing  cruelly  at  every 
scar  and  wrinkle.  At  every  return  it  daz- 
zles the  eyes  of  one  tall  girl  at  the  end  of 
the  platform,  among  the  warriors ;  she  turns 
away  her  head,  or  grimaces.  In  the  middle 
of  the  platform  there  is  a  violent  episode 
of  horse-play:  a  man  in  plain  clothes  be- 
labours two  clowns  with  a  sounding  lath, 
and  is  in  turn  belaboured;  then  the  three 
rush  together  pell-mell,  roll  over  one  an- 
other, bump  down  the  steps  to  the  ground, 
return,  recommence,  with  the  vigour  and 
gusto  of  schoolboys  in  a  scrimmage. 
Further  on  a  white  clown  tumbles  on  a 
stage,  girls  in  pink,  and  black,  and  white 
move  vaguely  before  a  dark  red  curtain, 
brilliant  red  breeches  sparkle,  a  girl  en 
gargon,  standing  at  one  side  in  a  graceful 

17 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


pose  which  reveals  her  fine  outlines,  shows 
a  motionless  silhouette,  cut  out  sharply 
against  the  light;  the  bell  rings,  the  drum 
beats,  a  large  blonde-wigged  woman,  dressed 
in  Louis  XIV  costume,  cries  her  wares 
and  holds  up  placards,  white  linen  with 
irregular  black  lettering.  Outside  a  box- 
ing booth  a  melancholy  lean  man  blows 
inaudibly  into  a  horn;  his  cheeks  puff, 
his  fingers  move,  but  not  a  sound  can 
be  heard  above  the  thunder  of  the 
band  of  Laurent  le  Dompteur.  Before 
the  ombres  chinoises  a  lamp  hanging  to 
a  tree  sheds  its  light  on  a  dark  red  back- 
ground, on  the  gendarme  who  moves  across 
the  platform,  on  the  pink  and  green  hat  of 
madame,  and  on  her  plump  hand  supporting 
her  chin,  on  monsieur's  irreproachable  silk 
hat  and  white  whiskers.  Near  by  is  a 
theatre  where  they  are  giving  the  Cloches 
de  Comeville,  and  the  platform  is  thronged 
with  lounging  girls  in  tights.     They  turn 

18 


THE     GINGERBREAD     FAIR     AT     VINCENNES 

their  backs  unconcernedly  to  the  crowd,  and 
the  light  falls  on  pointed  shoulder-blades, 
one  distinguishes  the  higher  vertebrae  of 
the  spine.  A  man  dressed  in  a  burlesque 
female  costume  kicks  a  print  dress  extrava- 
gantly into  the  air,  flutters  a  ridiculous  fan, 
with  mincing  airs,  with  turns  and  somer- 
saults.  People  begin  to  enter,  and  the  plat- 
form clears ;  a  line  of  figures  marches  along 
the  narrow  footway  running  the  length  of 
the  building,  to  a  curtained  entrance  at  the 
end.  The  crowd  in  front  melts  away, 
straggles  across  the  road  to  another  show, 
straggling  back  again  as  the  drum  begins 
to  beat  and  the  line  of  figures  marches  back 
to  the  stage. 

In  front,  at  the  outskirts  of  the  crowd, 
two  youngsters  in  blouses  have  begun  to 
dance,  kicking  their  legs  in  the  air  to  the 
strains  of  a  mazurka;  and  now  two  women 
circle.  A  blind  man,  in  the  space  between 
two  booths,  sits  holding  a  candle  in  his  hand, 

19 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


a  pitiful  object;  the  light  falls  on  his  straw 
hat,  the  white  placard  on  his  breast,  his  face 
is  in  shadow.  As  I  pause  before  a  booth 
where  a  fat  woman  in  tights  flourishes  a 
pair  of  boxing  gloves,  I  find  myself  by  the 
side  of  my  Monna  Lisa  of  the  enchanted 
garden.  Her  show  is  over,  and  she  is  watch- 
ing the  others.  She  wears  a  simple  black 
dress  and  a  dark  blue  apron;  her  hair  is 
neatly  tied  back  with  a  ribbon.  She  is  quite 
ready  to  be  amused,  and  it  is  not  only  I, 
but  the  little  professional  lady,  who  laughs 
at  the  farce  which  begins  on  a  neighbour- 
ing stage,  where  a  patchwork  clown  comes 
out  arm  in  arm  with  a  nightmare  of  a 
pelican,  the  brown  legs  very  human,  the 
white  body  and  monstrous  orange  bill  very 
fearsome  and  fantastic.  A  pale  Pierrot 
languishes  against  a  tree:  I  see  him  as  I 
turn  to  go,  and,  looking  back,  I  can  still  dis- 
tinguish the  melancholy  figure  above  the 
waltz  of  the  red,  and  pink,  and  purple  undef 
20 


THE     GINGERBREAD     FAIR     AT     VINCENNES 

the  lights,  the  ceaseless  turning  of  those 
human  dolls,  with  their  fixed  smile,  their 
painted  colours. 


IV 


It  is  half-past  eleven,  and  the  fair  is  over 
for  the  night.  One  by  one  the  lights  are 
extinguished;  faint  glimmers  appear  in  the 
little  square  windows  of  dressing  rooms  and 
sleeping  rooms;  silhouettes  cross  and  re- 
cross  the  drawn  blinds,  with  lifted  arms  and 
huddled  draperies.  The  gods  of  tableaux 
vivants,  negligently  modern  in  attire,  stroll 
off  across  the  road  to  find  a  comrade,  rolling 
a  cigarette  between  their  fingers.  Monna 
Lisa  passes  rapidly,  with  her  brother,  car- 
rying a  marketing  basket.  And  it  is  a  steady 
movement  townwards;  the  very  stragglers 
prepare  to  go,  stopping,  from  time  to  time, 
to  buy  a  great  gingerbread  pig  with  Jean 
21 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


or  Suzanne  scrawled  in  great  white  letters 
across  it.  Outside  one  booth,  not  yet  closed, 
I  am  arrested  by  the  desolation  of  a  little 
frail  creature,  with  a  thin,  suffering,  painted 
face,  his  pink  legs  crossed,  who  sits  motion- 
less by  the  side  of  the  great  drum,  looking 
down  wearily  at  the  cymbals  that  he  still 
holds  in  his  hands.  In  the  open  spaces 
roundabouts  turn,  turn,  a  circle  of  moving 
lights,  encircled  by  a  thin  line  of  black 
shadows.  The  sky  darkens,  a  little  wind  is 
rising ;  the  night,  after  this  day  of  heat,  will 
be  stormy.  And  still,  to  the  waltz  measure 
of  the  roundabouts,  turning,  turning  franti- 
cally, the  last  lingerers  defy  the  midnight,  a 
dance  of  shadows. 
1896, 


§2 


MONTMARTRE  AND  THE 
LATIN  QUARTER 


MONTMARTRE  AND  THE  LATIN 
QUARTER 

Of  all  places  for  a  holiday,  Paris,  to  my 
mind,  is  the  most  recreative;  but  not  the 
Paris  of  the  English  tourist.  To  the  Eng- 
lish tourist  Paris  consists  in  the  Champs- 
Elysees  and  the  Grands  Boulevards,  with, 
of  course,  the  shops  in  the  Rue  de  Rivoli. 
In  other  words,  he  selects  out  of  all  Paris 
precisely  what  is  least  Parisian.  The  Rue 
de  Rivoli  always  reminds  me  of  Boulogne; 
the  one  is  the  Englishman's  part  of  Paris, 
as  the  other  is  the  Englishman's  part  of 
France,  and  their  further  resemblances  are 
many  and  intimate.  The  Champs-Elysees 
have  their  moments  and  their  hours  of  in- 
terest ;  it  may  be  admitted  that  they  are  only 
partially  Anglicised.  As  for  the  Grands 
Boulevards,  which  are  always,  certainly,  at- 
tractive to  any  genuine  lover  of  cities,  to 
25 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


any  real  amateur  of  crowds,  they  are,  after 
all,  not  Parisian,  but  cosmopolitan.  They 
are  simply  the  French  equivalent  of  that 
great,  complex,  inextricable  concourse  of 
people  which  we  find  instinctively  crowding, 
in  London,  along  Piccadilly;  in  Berlin,  down 
the  Unter  den  Linden;  in  Madrid,  over  the 
Prado;  in  Venice,  about  the  Piazza:  a 
crowding  of  people  who  have  come  together 
from  all  the  ends  of  the  earth,  who  have, 
if  tourist  likes  to  meet  tourist,  mutual  at- 
traction enough;  who  have,  undoubtedly, 
the  curiosity  of  an  exhibition  or  an  ethno- 
logical museum;  but  from  whom  you  will 
never  learn  the  characteristics  of  the  coun- 
try in  which  you  find  them.  What  is  really 
of  interest  in  a  city  or  in  a  nation  is  not 
that  which  it  has,  however  differentiated, 
in  common  with  other  nations  and  cities, 
but  that  which  is  unique  in  it,  the  equivalent 
of  which  you  will  search  for  in  vain  else- 
where. Now  the  two  parts  of  Paris  which 
26 


Quartier  Latin,  io  A.  M. 


MONTMARTRE     AND     THE     LATIN      QUARTER 

are  unique,  the  equivalent  of  which  you 
will  search  for  in  vain  elsewhere,  are  the 
Quartier  Latin  and  Montmartre.  And  these 
are  just  the  quarters  which  the  English 
tourist,  as  a  rule,  knows  least  about;  fancy- 
ing, though  he  may,  that  he  knows  them, 
because  he  has  climbed  Montmartre  as  far 
as  the  Moulin-Rouge,  and  gone  leftward  one 
Saturday  night  as  far  as  Bullier. 

I  have  often,  when  sitting  at  the  Bras- 
serie d'Harcourt,  on  the  "les  serious"  side, 
the  side  facing  the  Boulevard  Saint-Michel, 
tried  to  imagine  that  gay,  noisy,  and  irre- 
sponsible throng  which  surges  in  and  out  of 
the  doors,  overflows  the  terrasse,  and  scat- 
ters up  and  down  the  street;  I  have  tried, 
but  always  in  vain,  to  imagine  it,  so  to 
speak,  in  terms  of  London.  No,  it  is  simply 
unthinkable.  That  Piccadilly  (or  is  it  to 
be  the  Strand?)  will  some  day  more  or  less 
approximate  to  the  continental  idea  of  the 
necessary  comforts  of  life,  that  it  will  have 
27 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


its  cafes  like  every  other  civilised  city,  and 
so  redeem  England  from  the  disgrace  of 
being  the  only  country  where  men  have  to 
drink,  like  cattle,  standing;  that,  I  have  no 
doubt,  is  merely  a  matter  of  time;  it  will 
come.  But  there  will  never  be  a  Boul* 
Mich*  in  London.  It  is  as  impossible  as 
Marcelle  and  Suzanne.  The  Boul'  Mich' 
is  simply  the  effervescence  of  irrepressible 
youth;  and  youth  in  London  never  effer- 
vesces, or  only  in  one  man  here,  in  one 
woman  there.  The  stern  British  moralist 
tells  us  it  is  indeed  fortunate  that  we  have 
not  a  Boulevard  Saint-Michel  in  our  midst; 
that  we  have  not,  and  never  can  have,  a 
d'Harcourt ;  and  he  points  to  the  vice  which 
flaunts  there.  No  doubt  whatever  vice  is 
to  be  found  in  the  Quartier,  does  very  much 
flaunt  itself.  But  is  it  not  really  less  vicious, 
in  a  certain  sense,  than  the  corresponding 
thing  in  London,  which  takes  itself  so 
seriously  as  well  as  cautiously,  is  so  seif- 
28 


MONTMARTRE     AND     THE     LATIN     QUARTER 

convinced  of  evil-doing  and  has  all  the  un- 
healthy excitement  of  an  impotent  but  per- 
sistent Puritan  conscience?  However,  be 
this  as  it  may,  the  real  peculiarity  of  the 
youth  of  the  Latin  quarter  is  its  friendly 
gaiety,  its  very  boisterous  sociability,  its  ex- 
traordinary capacity  for  prolonging  the 
period  of  its  existence — the  existence  of  that 
volatile  quantity,  youth — into  the  period  of 
beards  and  the  past  thirties.  You  may  say, 
if  you  like,  that  it  is  ridiculous,  that  grown- 
up men  should  know  better  than  to  run 
about  the  street  with  long  hair  and  large 
hats,  singing  and  shouting  from  eleven  in  the 
evening  till  two  in  the  morning.  It  has  its 
ridiculous  side,  certainly,  but  it  is  remark- 
able, above  all,  as  a  survival  of  youth,  and 
it  implies  a  joie  de  vivre,  which  is  a  very 
valuable  and  not  a  very  common  quality. 

The   place   and   the  moment   where   the 
Quartier  Latin  becomes — what  shall  I  say? 
— its  best  self,  are  upon  those  fine  Sunday 
29 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

afternoons  when  the  band  plays  in  the  Lux- 
embourg Gardens.  Does  every  one  know 
Manet's  picture  of  the  scene:  the  long 
frock-coats,  the  long  hair,  the  very  tall  hats, 
the  voluminous  skirts  of  the  ladies,  and  the 
enchantment  of  those  green  trees  over  and 
between  and  around  it  all?  Well,  the  real 
thing  is  as  delightful  even  as  a  Manet;  and 
when  I  am  in  Paris,  in  the  fine  weather,  I 
consider  that  Sunday  is  not  quite  Sunday  if 
a  part  of  it  is  not  spent  just  as  those  people 
in  the  picture  spend  it.  Early  in  the  after- 
noon groups  begin  to  form;  Marcelle  and 
Suzanne  bring  their  sewing,  or  a  book  of 
verses,  for  a  pretence,  and  each  has  her  little 
circle  about  her.  The  chairs  around  the 
band-stand  fill  gradually,  the  tables  of  the 
little  green  buvette  spread  further  and 
further  outwards,  leaving  just  room  for  the 
promenade  which  will  soon  begin,  that 
church-parade  of  such  another  sort  from 
the  London  one,  so  blithely — 
30 


5JW4feg 


Quartier  Latin,  5  P.  M. 


MONTMARTRE     AND     THE     LATIN     QUARTER 

"within  this  fair, 
This  quiet  church  of  leaves." 

Further  out  again,  along  the  terrace,  be- 
tween the  last  trees  and  the  line  and  curve 
of  the  balustrade,  there  is  an  outer,  quite 
different,  rim  of  mothers  and  nurses  and 
children.  And  now  the  band  is  playing,  it 
is  the  ballet  music  in  Faust;  and  the  shim- 
mery  music,  coming  like  sunshine  into  the 
sunlights  of  such  an  afternoon,  just  here 
and  now,  sounds  almost  beautiful,  as  things 
do  always  when  they  are  beautifully  in 
keeping.  Marcelle  and  Suzanne,  between 
two  shouts  of  laughter,  feel  the  poetry  of 
the  moment;  they  are  even  silent,  biting 
meditatively  the  corner  of  a  fanciful  hand- 
kerchief. And  the  slowly  moving  throng 
which  trails  around  the  narrow  alley  be- 
tween the  chairs  is  no  longer  the  noisy,  ir- 
repressible throng  which  last  night  acted  the 
farce  of  the  monome  from  door  to  door  of 
the  d'Harcourt ;  it  is  the  other,  more  serious, 
3i 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

more  sentimental  side  of  that  vivid  youth 
which  incarnates  and  is  the  incarnation  of 
the  Quartier  Latin. 

Up  at  Montmartre,  how  different  is  the 
atmosphere,  yet  how  typically  Parisian! 
To  reach  Montmartre  you  have  to  go  right 
through  Paris,  and  I  always  think  the 
route  followed  by  that  charming  omnibus, 
the  "Batignolles-Clichy-Odeon,"  shows  one 
more  of  Paris,  in  the  forty  or  fifty  minutes 
that  it  takes,  than  any  other  route  I  know. 
It  is  an  April  evening;  nine  o'clock  has  just 
struck.  I  am  tired  of  turning  over  the 
books  under  the  arcades  of  the  Odeon,  and 
I  mount  the  omnibus.  The  heavy  wheels 
rattle  over  the  rough  stones,  down  the 
broad,  ugly  Rue  de  Tournon.  We  curve 
through  narrow,  winding  streets,  which  be- 
gin to  grow  Catholic,  blossoming  out  into 
windowfuls  of  wax-candles,  as  we  near 
Saint  -  Sulpice,  our  first  stopping  -  place. 
After  we  have  left  the  broad,  always  some- 
32 


MONTMARTRE     AND     THE     LATIN     QUARTER 

what  prim  and  quiet  open  space,  dominated 
by  the  formidable  bulk  of  the  curious,  com- 
posite church,  it  is  by  more  or  less  feature- 
less ways  that  we  reach  the  Boulevard 
Saint-Germain,  coming  out  suddenly  under 
the  trees,  so  beautiful,  I  always  think,  in 
that  odd,  acute  glitter  which  gas-light  gives 
them.  There  are  always  a  good  many  people 
waiting  here;  my  side  of  the  imperial  is 
soon  full.  We  cross  the  road,  and  the  two 
horses  start  at  full  speed,  as  they  invari- 
ably do  at  that  particular  place,  down  the 
Rue  des  Saints-Peres.  The  street  is  long 
and  narrow,  few  people  are  passing;  all  the 
life  of  the  street  seems  to  be  concentrated 
behind  those  lighted  windows,  against  which 
we  pass  so  close.  I  catch  a  glimpse  of  in- 
teriors ;  a  table  with  a  red  table-cloth,  a  lamp 
upon  it,  a  girl  sewing;  she  leans  forward, 
and  the  lights  crimson  her  cheek.  Another 
room,  an  old  woman  holding  a  candle  moves 
across  the  window ;  in  another  I  see  the  back 
33 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

of  an  arm-chair,  just  a  tuft  of  blonde  hair 
overtopping  it;  there  are  two  candles  on 
the  table,  several  books.  Farther  on,  the 
curtains  are  drawn,  I  can  see  only  a  sil- 
houette, the  face  and  bust  of  a  woman, 
clearly  outlined,  as  she  sits  motionless.  We 
turn  the  corner,  are  on  the  Quai,  and  now 
crossing  slowly  the  Pont  des  Arts.  The 
heavy  masonry  of  the  Louvre  looms  up  in 
front;  to  right  and  left  below,  the  Seine, 
draped  in  shadow,  with  sharp  points  of  white 
and  red  where  the  lights  strike  the  water. 
Then  begins  the  jolting  and  rumbling  over 
the  horrible  pavement  of  the  Louvre,  the 
sudden  silence  as  the  wheels  glide  over  the 
asphalte,  and  we  emerge,  through  that  im- 
possibly narrow  archway,  into  the  Rue  de 
Rivoli;  in  two  minutes  we  are  at  the  Palais 
Royal.  For  a  moment  I  see  the  twisting 
currents  of  cabs,  down  the  Avenue  de 
TOpera,  and  then  we  are  in  the  interminable 
Rue  de  Richelieu,  broken  only  by  the  long, 

34 


MONTMARTRE     AND     THE      LATIN      QUARTER 

but  new,  monotony  of  the  dreary  Biblio- 
theque  Nationale,  and  that  odd,  charming 
little  square  opposite,  with  its  old  houses,  its 
fountain,  its  dingy  trees,  its  seats.  At  last 
we  have  reached  the  Grands  Boulevards, 
and  we  edge  our  way  slowly  across,  between 
the  omnibuses  and  cabs.  The  boulevard  is 
not  crowded,  it  is  the  hour  of  the  theatres; 
and  then  I  am  facing  that  side  of  the  street 
which  I  never  care  for,  the  virtuous  side 
(despite  Julien's).  When  we  turn  up  the 
Rue  Le  Peletier,  out  of  the  broad,  lighted 
space  stretching  on  in  a  long  vista  between 
the  trees  and  lamp-posts,  we  find  ourselves, 
ere  long,  in  a  new  atmosphere;  first,  that 
ambiguous  quarter  of  the  Chaussee  d'Antin, 
then  the  franker  Montmartre.  As  we  toil 
up  the  steep  Rue  Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, 
past  that  severe  but  eccentric  church  which 
seems  trying  to  block  our  way,  but  in  vain, 
I  watch  curiously  the  significant  windows, 
with  their  lights  and  their  blinds.  As  the 
35 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


horses  turn  aside,  Clichy-wards  I  get  down ; 
there,  just  before  me,  as  if  at  the  other  end 
of  the  street,  across  the  broad  open  space 
of  the  Place  Blanche,  are  the  red  bulk  and 
waving  sails  of  the  Moulin-Rouge.  And 
that  is  one  of  the  landmarks  of  Montmartre. 

They  tell  me  that  Montmartre  is  not  what 
it  once  was,  in  the  great  days  of  the 
Chateau-Rouge,  of  the  Boule-Noire.  And 
even  in  my  time  there  has  been  a  certain 
falling  away;  for  have  I  not  seen  the  death 
of  the  Elysee-Montmartre,  and  the  trivial 
resurrection,  out  of  its  ashes,  of  a  certain 
characterless  Trianon-Concert  ? 

Still,  if  some  of  the  glories  of  Montmartre 
are  gone,  Montmartre  remains,  and  it  re- 
mains unique.  In  no  other  city  can  I  recall 
anything  in  itself  so  sordidly  picturesque  as 
those  crawling  heights,  which  lead  up  to  the 
Butte,  so  wonderful  as  the  vision  of  the  city 
which  the  Butte  gives  one.  I  know  Mont- 
martre chiefly  by  night ;  it  is  not  a  place  for 

36 


Quastier  Latin,  2  A.  M. 


MONTMARTRE     AND     THE     LATIN     QUARTER 

the  day;  and  the  view  of  Paris  which  I  am 
thinking  of  is  the  view  of  Paris  by  night. 
When  you  have  climbed  as  high  as  you  can 
climb,  ending  almost  with  ladders,  you  reach 
a  dreary  little  strip  of  ground,  in  which  a 
rough  wooden  paling  seems  to  hold  you  back 
from  falling  sheer  into  the  abyss  of  Paris. 
Under  a  wild  sky,  as  I  like  to  see  it,  the 
city  floats  away  endlessly,  a  vague,  immense 
vision  of  forests  of  houses,  softened  by 
fringes  of  actual  forest;  here  and  there  a 
dome,  a  tower,  brings  suddenly  before  the 
eyes  a  definite  locality ;  but  for  the  most  part 
it  is  but  a  succession  of  light  and  shade, 
here  tall  white  houses  coming  up  out  of  a 
pit  of  shadow,  there  an  unintelligible  mass 
of  darkness,  sheared  through  by  an  inex- 
plicable arrow  of  light.  Right  down  below, 
one  looks  straight  into  the  lighted  windows, 
distinguishing  the  outline  of  the  lamp  on 
the  table,  of  the  figure  which  moves  about 
the  room;  while,  in  the  far  distance,  there 
37 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

is  nothing  but  a  faint,  reddish  haze,  rising 
dubiously  into  the  night,  as  if  the  lusts  of 
Paris  smoked  to  the  skies.  Night  after 
night  I  have  been  up  to  this  odd,  fascinating 
little  corner,  merely  to  look  at  all  I  had  left 
behind;  and  I  have  been  struck  by  the  at- 
traction which  this  view  obviously  has  for 
the  somewhat  unpleasant  and  unimpression- 
able people  who  inhabit  the  neighbourhood. 
Aristide  Bruant's  heroes  and  heroines,  the 
lady  on  her  way  to  Saint-Lazare,  the 
gentleman — who  knows? — perhaps  to  La 
Roquette,  they  rest  from  their  labours  at 
times,  and,  leaning  over  the  wooden  paling, 
I  am  sure  enjoy  Paris  impressionistically. 
Perhaps  this  is  one  of  the  gifts  of  the 
esprit  Montmartre,  that  philosophy  of  the 
pavement  which  has  always  been  more  or 
less  localised  in  this  district.  Here  at 
Montmartre  of  course,  and  of  it  essentially, 
are  almost  all  the  public  balls,  the  really 
Parisian  cafe-concerts,  which  exist  in  Paris. 

38 


Le  Rat  Mort 


MONTMARTRE     AND     THE     LATIN     QUARTER 

The  establishments  in  the  Champs-Elysees 
are  after  an  order  of  their  own;  the  Folies- 
Bergere  is  an  unsuccessful  attempt  to  imitate 
an  English  music-hall  and  a  successful  at- 
tempt to  attract  the  English  public;  but 
amusing  Paris,  and  Paris  which  amuses  it- 
self, goes  to  Montmartre.  The  cabaret  of 
Aristide  Bruant  has  lost  something  of  its 
special  character  since  Bruant  took  to  sing- 


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Invitation  Card  of  the  Rat  Mort 

39 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

ing  at  the  Ambassadeurs ;  the  Concert  Lis- 
bonne,  which  was  once  so  pleasantly  eccen- 
tric, has  become  ordinary;  but  there  is  still 
the  true  ring  of  Montmartre  in  the  Carillon, 
that  homely  little  place  in  the  Rue  de  la 
Tour-d'Auvergne,  and  the  baser  kind  of 
Montmartre  wit  in  the  Concert  des  Con- 
cierges, not  far  off.  And  then,  to  end  the 
evening,  is  there  not  the  Rat  Mort,  of  which 
a  conscientious  English  lady  novelist  once 
gave  so  fanciful  a  picture?  The  Rat  Mort, 
which  ends  the  evening,  sums  up  Mont- 
martre; not  wisely,  perhaps,  not  prudently, 
but  with  "some  emotions  and  a  moral." 
1904. 


40 


PARIS  AND  IDEAS 


• 


PARIS  AND  IDEAS 

I  have  been  turning  over  a  book  which 
has  called  up  many  memories,  and  which 
has  set  me  thinking  about  people  and  ideas. 
The  book  is  called  French  Portraits:  being 
Appreciations  of  the  Writers  of  Young 
France,  is  published  in  Boston  and  it  is 
written  by  an  American,  who  writes  some- 
what hysterically,  but  in  a  spirit  of  generous 
appreciation.  It  is  pretentious,  as  the  people 
in  the  Latin  Quarter  are  pretentious;  that 
is  to  say,  innocently,  and  on  behalf  of  ideas. 
It  all  keeps  step,  gallantly  enough,  to  a 
march,  not  Schumann's,  of  the  followers  of 
David  against  the  Philistines.  One  seems  to 
see  a  straggling  company  wandering  down 
at  night  from  the  heights  of  Montmartre: 
the  thin  faces,  long  hair,  flat-brimmed  tall 
hats  and  wide-brimmed  soft  hats,  the 
broken  gestures,  eager  voices,  desperate 
43 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

light-heartedness.  They  have  not  more 
talent  than  people  over  here;  they  are  much 
more  likely  to  waste,  as  it  is  called,  what- 
ever talent  they  have ;  but  these  people  whom 
this  book  calls  up  before  us  are  after  all 
the  enthusiasts  of  ideas,  and  their  follies 
bubble  up  out  of  a  drunkenness  at  least  as 
much  spiritual  as  material.  Few  of  the 
idealists  I  have  known  have  been  virtuous; 
that  is  to  say  they  have  chosen  their  virtues 
after  a  somewhat  haphazard  plan  of  their 
own;  some  of  them  have  loved  absinthe, 
others  dirt,  all  idleness;  but  why  expect 
everything  at  once?  Have  we,  who  lack 
ideas  and  ideals,  enough  of  the  solid  virtues 
to  put  into  the  balance  against  these  weighty 
abstractions?  I  only  ask  the  question;  but 
I  persist  in  thinking  that  we  have  still  a 
great  deal  to  learn  from  Paris,  and  especially 
on  matters  of  the  higher  morality. 

Well,  this  writer,  in  his  vague,  heated, 
liberal  way,  scatters  about  him,  in  this  large 
44 


Cartoon  of  Jean  Moreas  by  Emile  Cohl 
and  Signature  of  Moreas 


PARIS     AND     IDEAS 


book  of  his,  many  excellent  criticisms  of 
people  and  things;  flinging  them  in  our 
faces,  indeed,  and  as  often  the  stem  with- 
out the  flower  as  the  flower  without  the 
stem.  He  tells  us  about  Verlaine  and 
Mallarme,  about  Barres,  Marcel  Schwob, 
Maeterlinck,  Moreas,  Pierre  Louys,  and  a 
score  of  others;  not  as  precisely  as  one 
might  have  wished,  often  indeed  rather  mis- 
leadingly,  but  always  with  at  least  the 
freshness  of  a  personal  interest.  An  un- 
wary reader  might,  it  is  true,  imagine  that 
the  chapter  on  Maeterlinck  records  an 
actual  conversation,  an  actual  walk  through 
Brussels:  instead  of  a  conversation  wholly 
imaginary,  made  up  of  scraps  out  of  the 
essays,  rather  casually  tossed  together.  Such 
a  reader  will  indeed  be  beset  by  pitfalls,  and 
will  perhaps  come  away  with  several  curious 
impressions:  such  as  that  Adolphe  Rette  is 
a  great  poet  and  Henri  de  Regnier  not  a 
poet  at  all.  But  books  are  not  written  for 
45 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

unwary  readers,  and  pitfalls  are  only- 
dangerous  to  those  who  have  not  the  agility 
to  avoid  them.  The  portraits,  especially 
Valloton's  clever  outlines  (mostly  repro- 
duced from  Remy  de  Gourmont's  two  ad- 
mirable volumes  of  Le  Livre  des  Masques) 
give  a  serious  value  to  these  pages,  and 
there  are,  in  all,  more  than  fifty  portraits. 
As  I  turn  over  the  pictures,  recognising 
face  after  face,  I  am  reminded  of  many 
nights  and  days  during  the  ten  years  that 
I  have  known  Paris,  and  a  wheel  of  memory 
seems  to  turn  in  my  head  like  a  kaleido- 
scope, flashing  out  the  pictures  of  my  own 
that  I  keep  there.  The  great  sleepy  and 
fiery  head  of  Verlaine  is  in  so  many  of  them. 
He  lies  back  in  his  corner  at  the  Cafe 
Francois  Premier,  with  his  eyes  half  shut; 
he  drags  on  my  arm  as  we  go  up  the  boule- 
vard together ;  he  shows  me  his  Bible  in  the 
little  room  up  the  back  stairs;  he  nods  his 
•whtcap  over  a  great  picture  book  as  he  sits 

46 


PARIS     AND     IDEAS 


up  in  bed  at  the  hospital.  I  see  Mallarme 
as  he  opens  the  door  to  me  on  that  fourth 
floor  of  the  Rue  de  Rome,  with  his  exquisite 
manner  of  welcome.  Catulle  Mendes  lec- 
tures on  the  poetry  of  the  Parnassians,  read- 
ing Glatigny's  verses  with  his  suave  and 
gliding  intonation.  I  see  Maeterlinck  in  all 
the  hurry  of  a  departure,  between  two  port- 
manteaus ;  Marcel  Schwob  in  a  quiet  corner 
by  his  own  fireside,  discussing  the  first 
quarto  of  Hamlet.  Maurice  Barres  stands 
before  an  after-luncheon  camera,  with  the 
Princess  Mathilde  on  his  arm,  in  an  im- 
provised group  on  the  lawn.  Jean  Moreas, 
with  his  practical  air,  thunders  out  a  poem 
of  his  own  to  a  waitress  in  a  Bouillon  Duval. 
I  find  myself  by  the  side  of  Adolphe  Rette 
at  a  strange  performance  in  which  a  play 
of  Tola  Dorian  is  followed  by  a  play  of 
Rachilde.  Stuart  Merrill  introduces  me  to 
an  editor  at  the  Bullier,  Viele-Griffin  speaks 
English  with  an  evident  reluctance  at  the 
47 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


office  of  the  Mercure  de  France,  where 
Henri  de  Regnier  is  silent  under  his  eye- 
glass. It  is  a  varied  company,  and  there  are 
all  the  others  whom  I  do  not  know,  or  whom 
I  have  met  only  out  of  Paris,  like  Verhaeren. 
In  those  houses,  those  hospitals,  those  cafes, 
many  of  the  ideas  on  which,  consciously  or 
unconsciously,  how  many  of  us  are  now  liv- 
ing, came  into  existence.  Meanwhile,  how 
many  ideas,  of  any  particular  importance  to 
anybody,  have  come  into  existence  in  the 
London  drawing-rooms  and  clubs  of  the 
period,  where  our  men  of  letters  meet  one 
another,  with  a  mutually  comfortable  re- 
solve not  to  talk  "shop"  ? 

Ideas,  it  may  be  objected,  are  one  thing; 
achievement  is  quite  another.  Yes,  achieve- 
ment is  quite  another,  but  achievement  may 
sometimes  be  left  out  of  the  question  not 
unprofitably.  It  is  too  soon  to  see  how  much 
has  been  actually  done  by  the  younger  men 
I  have  named;  but  think  how  Maeterlinck 
48 


PARIS     AND     IDEAS 


has  brought  a  new  soul  into  the  drama ;  has 
brought  (may  one  not  say?)  the  soul  into 
drama.  Think  what  Verlaine  has  done  for 
French  poetry,  ending  a  tradition,  which 
only  waited  extinction,  and  creating  in  its 
place  a  new  law  of  freedom,  of  legitimate 
freedom,  full  of  infinite  possibilities.  And, 
coming  down  to  the  very  youngest  school  of 
"Naturists"  (or  is  there,  as  I  write,  a  still 
younger  one  already?),  is  there  not  a  sig- 
nificant ferment  of  thought,  a  convinced 
and  persuasive  restatement  of  great  princi- 
ples, which  every  generation  has  to  discover 
over  again  for  itself,  under  some  new  form? 
All  these  men,  or,  to  be  exact,  nearly  all 
these  men,  have  thought  before  writing, 
have  thought  about  writing,  have  thought 
about  other  things  than  writing.  They 
have  taken  the  trouble  to  form  theories,  they 
have  not  hesitated  to  lay  a  foundation  before 
building.  The  foundation  has  not  always 
been  solid,  nor  the  building  a  fine  piece  of 
49 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

architecture.  But  at  least  literature  in 
France  is  not  a  mere  professional  business, 
as  so  much  of  what  passes  for  literature 
is  in  England,  it  is  not  written  for  money, 
and  it  is  not  written  mechanically,  for  the 
mere  sake  of  producing  a  book  of  verse 
or  prose.  In  Paris  the  word  art  means  a 
very  serious  and  a  very  definite  thing:  a 
thing  for  which  otherwise  very  unheroic 
people  will  cheerfully  sacrifice  whatever 
chances  they  may  have  of  worldly  success. 
Over  here  I  know  remarkably  few  people 
who  seem  to  me  to  be  sacrificing  as  much 
for  art  as  almost  any  one  of  those  disorderly 
young  men  who  walk  so  picturesquely  in  the 
Luxembourg  Gardens  when  the  band  plays. 
Well,  the  mere  desire  to  excel,  the  mere 
faithfulness  to  a  perhaps  preposterous 
theory  of  one's  duty  to  art,  the  mere  attempt 
to  write  literature,  is  both  an  intellectual  and 
a  moral  quality,  which  it  is  worth  while  to 
recognise  for  what  it  is  worth,  even  if  the 

SO 


PARIS     AND     IDEAS 


outcome  of  it,  for  the  moment,  should  but 
be  some  Pere  Ubu  in  all  the  shapelessness 
of  the  embryo.  Where  we  have  the  germ  of 
life,  life  will  in  time  work  out  its  own  ac- 
complishment. And  for  ideas,  which  are  the 
first  stirrings  of  life  about  to  begin  we  must 
still,  I  think,  look  to  France. 
1900. 


• 


51 


THE  POET  OF  THE  BATS 


• 


THE  POET  OF  THE  BATS 

Visitors  to  the  Salon  du  Champ  de  Mars 
cannot  fail  to  have  noticed  a  full-length 
portrait  by  Whistler,  the  portrait  of  a  gentle- 
man of  somewhat  uncertain  age,  standing 
in  an  attitude  half  chivalrous,  half  funam- 
bulesque,  his  hand  lightly  posed  on  a  small 
cane.  There  is  something  distinguished, 
something  factitious,  about  the  whole  figure, 
and  on  turning  to  the  catalogue  one  could 
not  but  be  struck  by  a  certain  fantastic  ap- 
propriateness in  the  name,  Comte  Robert  de 
Montesquiou-Fezensac,  even  if  that  name 
conveyed  no  further  significance.  To  those 
who  know  something  of  the  curiosities  of 
French  literary  society,  the  picture  has  its 
interest  as  a  portrait  of  the  oddest  of 
Parisian  "originals,"  the  typical  French 
"aesthete,"  from  whose  cult  of  the  hortensia 
Oscar  Wilde  no  doubt  learnt  the  worship  of 
55 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


U30£lJ  Le*f  c^boiaJ  gb**ort*   ^<*ju7%~~ 

QtuJL  oust*  %?o't3?r~^  oL  ^et^&^j  A,**/?* 

olas**-r<t  tt.fr a*    *On  clocJ^ouMsx^J)    OLa.»  JLj 
OOT2AtL*^J 2ascJ5^  St*    <p  £tM  Po  tut*  cJLoSq~2 

*>it>lA*    &**.     «.PP*-&       Q I*'    So/*9co*^^e5 

MONTESQUIOU'S  PICTURESQUE   HANDWRITING 

56 


THE     POET     OF     THE     BATS 


the  sunflower;  while  to  readers  of  Huys- 
mans  it  has  the  further  interest  of  being  a 
portrait  of  the  real  des  Esseintes,  the  hero 
of  that  singular  and  remarkable  romance  of 
the  Decadence,  A  Rebours.  It  is  scarcely- 
likely  that  many  of  the  people,  or  indeed  any 
of  the  English  people  who  saw  the  picture, 
knew  that  it  was  also  the  portrait  of  a  poet, 
the  poet  of  the  bats,  Les  Chauves-Souris, 
an  enormous  volume  of  five  hundred  closely 
printed  pages. 

The  Comte  de  Montesquiou,  though  liv- 
ing, and  a  personage,  and  of  late  a  fait  divers 
in  the  papers  for  purely  mundane  reasons, 
is  none  the  less  a  legendary  being,  of  whom 
all  the  stories  that  are  told  may  very  likely 
be  true,  of  whom  at  all  events  nothing  can 
be  told  more  fantastic  than  the  truth.  Has 
he,  or  had  he,  really  a  series  of  rooms, 
draped  in  different  tones,  in  one  of  which 
he  could  only  read  French,  in  another  only 
Latin?    Did  he  really  gild  the  back  of  the 

57 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


tortoise,  and  then  inlay  it  with  jewels,  so  that 
it  might  crawl  over  the  carpet  in  arabesques 
of  living  colour,  until  the  poor  beast  died 
of  the  burden  of  its  unwonted  splendour? 
Did  he  really  invent  an  orchestra  of  per- 
fumes, an  orchestra  of  liqueurs,  on  which 
he  could  play  the  subtlest  harmonies  of  the 
senses?  He  certainly  at  one  time  possessed 
an  incredible  wardrobe,  from  which  he 
would  select  and  combine,  with  infinite 
labour,  the  costume  of  the  day ;  apologising, 
on  a  certain  misty  afternoon,  for  not  em- 
ploying the  Scotch  symphony  which  had  once 
before  so  perfectly  suited  a  similar  day: 
"but  it  takes  my  servant  so  long  to  prepare 
it !"  On  one  occasion  a  distinguished  French 
writer,  one  of  the  most  recent  of  Academi- 
cians, was  astonished,  on  opening  a  letter 
from  the  Comte  de  Montesquiou,  to  find 
along  with  the  letter  a  manuscript  copy  of 
Balzac's  Care  de  Tours,  written  in  an  il- 
literate hand.     Nothing  whatever  was  said 

S8 


THE     POET     OF     THE     BATS 


about  it,  and  on  meeting  his  correspondent, 
the  Academician  inquired  if  it  was  by  over- 
sight that  the  manuscript  had  been  enclosed. 
"Oh,  no,"  was  the  answer,  "the  fact  is,  my 
cook  and  my  butler  are  always  quarrelling, 
and  in  order  to  occupy  them  and  keep  them 
out  of  mischief,  I  give  them  Balzac's  stories 
to  copy  out;  and  I  send  the  copies  to  my 
friends.  Pere  Goriot  I  sent  to  Leconte  de 
Lisle :  I  only  sent  you  a  short  one." 

Until  a  year  or  two  ago,  the  Comte  de 
Montesquiou  indulged  in  the  luxury  of  en- 
joying an  artistic  reputation  without  having 
done  anything,  or  at  least  without  having 
published.  It  was  known  that  he  wrote 
poems,  but  no  one  had  seen  them;  he  had 
resolved  to  out-Mallarme  Mallarme,  and  he 
succeeded  so  well  that  it  was  generally  sup- 
posed that  these  vague,  shrouded  poems  were 
the  quintessence  of  what  was  perversely 
exquisite  in  spirit  and  in  form,  probably  few 
in  number,  but  no  doubt  not  less  faultless 

59 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


than  original.  All  at  once  the  veil  was 
dropped;  the  huge  volume  of  the  Chauves- 
Souris  appeared,  and  the  reticent  and  mys- 
terious poet  was  found  soliciting  press- 
notices,  paying  actresses  to  recite  his  poems, 
giving  receptions  at  his  "Pavillion"  at 
Versailles,  and  buttonholing  distinguished 
poets,  to  ask  them  what  they  really  thought 
of  his  poems.  It  is  a  little  difficult  to  say 
what  one  thinks  of  these  poems.  They  are 
divided,  according  to  an  apparently  rigid 
but  entirely  unintelligible  plan,  into  a  great 
many  divisions,  of  which  these  are  the 
principal:  Zaimph,  Demi-Teintes  (Pre- 
ludes), Tenebres  (Interludes),  Betes  et  Gens 
{Ombres  Chinoises),  Penombres  Office  de  la 
Lune  (Litanies  et  Antiennes) ,  Clair  iere 
(Coryphees),  Jets  de  Feu  et  Eaux  d' Artifice 
(Aqua-Teintes),  Lunatiques,  Vieilles  Lunes 
et  Lunes  Rousses,  Candidates  (Neomenies) 
Syzygie  (Ombre  portee)  Ancien  Regime. 
All  this  is  supposed  to  represent  "une  con- 

60 


THE     POET     OF     THE     BATS 


centration  du  mystere  nocturne,"  and  a  prose 
commentary,  which  certainly  makes  dark- 
ness more  visible,  is  added,  because,  the 
author  tells  us,  "des  sollicitudes  amies 
veulent  qu'un  leger  fil  permette  a  des  esprits 
curieux  et  bienveillants  de  reconnaitre  vite 
le  labyrinthe,  et,  plus  expressement,  d'ap- 
precier  la  division  architectonique,  voire 
architecturale,  peut-etre  le  meilleur  merite 
du  poeme."  Probably  nothing  more  calmly 
crazy  than  this  book — in  which  there  is  all 
the  disorder  without  any  of  the  delirium  of 
madness — was  ever  written:  the  book  cer- 
tainly has  its  interest.  The  possibilities  of 
verse  for  the  expression  of  fluent,  contorted, 
and  interminable  nonsense  have  never  been 
more  cogently  demonstrated  than  in  the 
pages  from  which  I  cull  at  random  these 
two  stanzas: 

"Terreur  des  Troglodytes, 
Sur  leurs  tapis  de  Turquies, 

61 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

Et  de  tous  les  rats  de  tes 
Batrakhomyomakhyes, 

Homere:  Meridarpax, 
Voleur  de  portioncule; 
Troxartes  et  Psikharpax, 
Par  qui  Peleion  recule." 

This  is  quite  an  average  specimen  of  the 
manner  of  the  poet  of  the  bats :  if,  however, 
one  prefers  a  greater  simplicity,  we  need  but 
turn  the  page,  and  we  read: 

"La  nuit  tous  les  chats  sont  gris, 
Toutes  les  souris  sont  fauves: 
Chauves-souris  et  chat-chauves, 
Chats-chauves  chauves-souris !" 

It  is  not  a  quality  that  the  author  would 
probably  appreciate,  but  the  quality  that 
most  impresses  in  this  book  is  the  extraor- 
dinary diligence  that  must  have  been  re- 
quired to  produce  it.  There  is  not  a  spon- 
taneous verse  in  it,  from  beginning  to  end 
62 


THE     POET     OF     THE     BATS 


few  would  seem  to  have  required  thought, 
but  none  could  have  failed  to  demand  labour. 
At  its  best  it  has  that  funambulesque  air  of 
the  Whistler  portrait ;  when  it  is  not  playing 
tricks  it  is  ambling  along  stolidly;  but  the 
quintessential  des  Esseintes,  the  father  and 
child  of  the  Decadence,  well,  des  Esseintes 
has  no  rival  to  fear  in  the  merely  real  Comte 
Robert  de  Montesquiou-Fezensac. 

1895- 


63 


SONGS  OF  THE  STREETS 


• 


SONGS  OF  THE  STREETS 

The  verse  of  Aristide  Bruant,  written,  as 
it  is,  to  be  sung,  and  before  the  casual  and 
somewhat  disorderly  audience  of  a  small 
cabaret  near  what  was  once  the  Elysee- 
Montmartre;  written,  as  it  is,  mainly  in  the 
slang  of  the  quarter  the  uncomely  argot  of 
those  boulevards  exterieurs  which  are  the 
haunts  of  all  that  is  most  sordidly  depraved 
in  Paris, — this  verse  is  yet,  in  virtue  of  its 
rare  qualities  of  simplicity,  sincerity,  and 
poignant  directness,  verse  of  really  serious, 
and  not  inconsiderable,  literary  merit.  Like 
the  powerful  designs  of  Steinlen,  which  il- 
lustrate them,  these  songs  are  for  the  most 
part  ugly  enough,  they  have  no  charm  or 
surprise  of  sentiment,  they  appeal  to  one  by 
no  imported  elegances,  by  none  of  the  con- 
ventionalities of  pathos  or  pity.  They  take 
the  real  life  of  poor  and  miserable  and  vi- 

67 


COLOUR    STUDIES    IN    PARIS 


cious  people,  their  real  sentiments,  their 
typical  moments  of  emotion  or  experience — 
as  in  the  very  terrible  and  very  blasphemous 
song  of  the  rain,  and  the  poor  soaked  vaga- 
bond ready  to  "curse  God  and  die" — and 
they  say  straight  out,  in  the  fewest  words, 
just  what  such  people  would  really  say,  with 
a  wonderful  art  in  the  reproduction  of  the 
actual  vulgar  accent.  Take,  for  instance, 
the  thief,  shut  up  a  Mazas,  who  writes  to 
his  p'tit'  Rose,  asking  her  to  send  him  un 
peu  d'oseille  (a  little  "oof") : 

Tu  dois  ben  ga  a  ton  p'tit  homme 
Qu'a  p't'et'  ete  mechant  pour  toi, 
Mais  qui  t'aimait  ben,  car,  en  somme, 
Si  j'te  flaupais,  tu  sais  pourquoi. 
A  present  qu'me  v'la  dans  les  planques 
Et  qu'je  n'peux  pus  t'coller  des  tas, 
Tu  n'te  figur's  pas  c'que  tu  m'manques, 
A  Mazas. 

Faut  que  j'te  d'mande  encor'  que  qu'chose, 
£a  s'rait  qu'  t'aill's  voir  un  peu  mes  vieux. 

68 


\&vu-    n\*~)*c<^-  Tfvftus-  Uy/tvj"^ 

Aristide  Bruant  (From  a  Photograph) 


SONGS     OF     THE     STREETS 


Vas-y,  dis,  j't'en  pri',  ma  p'tit'  Rose, 
Malgre  qu't'es  pas  bien  avec  eux. 
Je  n'sais  rien  de  c'qui  leur  arrive.  .  .  . 
Vrai,  c'est  pas  pour  fair'  du  pallas, 
Mais  j'voudrais  bien  qu'moman  m'ecrive, 
A  Mazas. 

Then  there  is  the  decrepit  old  beggar;  the 
"lily-livered"  creature  (fai  les  foi's  blancs) 
who  laments  his  useless  cowardice  in  regard 
to  matters  of  assault  and  battery,  but  is 
candid  enough  to  think  that  at  all  events  he 
will  come  to  no  violent  end  himself: 

Ma  tete  .  .  .  alle  aura  des  ch'veux  blancs, 

the  socialist  workman,  with  his  Faut  pus 
d'tout  ga  .  .  .  faut  pus  de  rien;  the  street- 
walker, her  lover  and  her  jealousies,  the 
grave-digger,  who  ends  all: 

Comm'  des  marie's,  couverts  d'fleurs, 
Tous  les  matins  on  m'en  apporte, 
Avec  leurs  parfums,  leurs  odeurs.  .  .  . 
Moi  j'trouv'  que  ca  sent  bon,  la  morte. 

69 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


ClNQUliut    AnnU. 


Lk  Num4io:    10  ClNTIKES. 


Le  Mirliton 

JOURNAL   I L LUSTRE 

paraisaanl  ttvs  irreguli^romeul  une  douzaine  de  fois  par  an. 

Paris.  uu:8fr.  Dep  art  anient  s,  un  an;  '5  tt. 

■iiuiii  84,  loiimii  locmeiioiaiT,  Milt 

Dihscteur:   ARISTIDE    BRUANT 

LES   DOS  (Dessin  de  Jkan   C.ullou) 


Y'LA  V 


Pits   <T  mar  mite,  plus  d'boullonl 


Coveb  Page  of  Le  Mieliton 
70 


SONGS     OF     THE     STREETS 


J'les  prends  dans  mes  bras,  a  mon  tour, 
Et  pis  j'les  berce.  .  .  .  Et  pis  j'les  couche, 
En  r'inflant  la  goule  d'amour 
Qui  s'eshappe  encor'  de  leur  bouche. 

You  may  say  that  these  are  not  agreeable 
people  to  be  introduced  to,  and  here  is  a 
book,  certainly,  which  it  is  open  to  every 
one  not  to  read.  But  such  people  exist  in 
real  life,  and  they  are  brought  before  us 
here,  as  they  so  rarely  are  in  the  literature 
which  professes  to  be  realistic,  with  an  ab- 
solute realism.  Bruant's  taste  lies  in  the 
direction  of  a  somewhat  macabre  humour; 
he  gives  us,  by  preference,  the  darker  side 
of  these  dark  and  shadowed  lines;  but  if 
there  is  much  that  he  leaves  out  of  the  pic- 
ture, at  all  events  he  introduces  nothing  into 
it  which  is  not  to  be  found  in  the  reality 
which  it  professes  to  copy.  Compare,  for 
instance,  les  gueux  of  Bruant  with  those  of 
Richepin.  Bruant  is  a  human  document,  a 
bit  of  crude  but  exact  observation ;  Richepin 
7i 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


gives  us  nothing  but  impossible  rhetoric 
about  impossible  persons.  And  who  would 
not  give  all  the  pseudo-philosophy,  the  pre- 
tentious and  preposterous  pessimism  of  the 
writer  of  Les  Blasphemes  for  this  little 
casual,  irresponsible  moral,  the  comment  on 
the  end  of  a  nameless  soldier  who  had  been 
guillotined  for  committing  a  murder: 

STs'rait  parti  pour  el  Tonquin, 
I's's'rait  fait  crever  l'casaquin 

Comm'  Riviere.  .  .  . 
Un  jour  on  aurait  p't'et'  grave, 
Sur  un  marbre  ou  sur  un  pave, 

L'nom  d'sa  miere. 

So  resigned,  in  so  desperate  a  resignation 
under  whatever  fate  may  send,  are  these 
children  of  the  gutter ;  philosophers,  in  their 
way,  since  they  can  accept  fortune  or  mis- 
fortune without  surprise,  if  also  without 
thankfulness.  Their  resignation,  their  sav- 
ageries, brutal  affections,  drunken  gaieties, 

72 


SONGS     OF     THE     STREETS 


obscene  delights;  all  these  Bruant  has  real- 
ised and  presented  in  the  two  volumes  of 
Dans  la  Rue,  which  sum  up,  as  nothing  else 
in  contemporary  literature  does,  the  whole 
life  of  the  streets,  where  that  life  is  most 
typical,  curious,  and  interesting,  in  Paris, 
along  the  dreary  sweep  of  the  outer  boule- 
vards. 

1895. 


/ 


73 


A  BOOK  OF  FRENCH  VERSES 


A  BOOK  OF  FRENCH  VERSES 

Years  ago,  when  I  was  in  Paris,  and  used 
to  go  and  see  Verlaine  every  week  in  his 
hospital,  I  remember  he  burst  out  suddenly- 
one  day  into  eulogies  of  Charles  Cros,  and 
asked  me  if  I  had  ever  read  Le  Coffret  de 
Santal.  On  my  saying  no,  he  urged  me  to 
read  it,  and  began  to  speak,  in  his  generous 
way,  of  what  it  seemed  to  him  he  had  learnt 
from  that  poet  of  one  book.  It  was  a  good 
while  before  I  succeeded  in  finding  a  copy; 
but  at  last  I  got  it,  and  read  it,  I  remember, 
at  that  time,  with  an  enchantment  which  I 
cannot  entirely  recapture  as  I  turn  over  the 
pages  again  to-day.  Not  long  afterwards  I 
was  at  a  literary  house,  and  I  overheard 
someone  being  addressed  as  Dr.  Cros.  I 
asked  him  if  he  was  related  to  Charles  Cros; 
his  brother,  he  told  me.  Finding  me  en- 
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COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

thusiastic,  he  talked  freely,  giving  me  quite 
a  new  idea  of  Charles  Cros  as  a  man  of 
science,  I  believe  the  discoverer  of  something 
or  other,  as  well  as  a  fantastic  poet.  Dr. 
Cros  told  me  that  his  brother  had  left  a 
number  of  MS.  poems,  at  his  death  in  1888; 
that  they  were  in  his  own  possession,  that 
he  would  be  glad  to  publish  them,  but  that 
Charles  Cros  was  so  little  known  that  no 
publisher  could  be  found  to  undertake  the 
publication.  I  promised  to  write  something 
about  Le  Coffret  de  Santal,  but,  other  things 
coming  in  the  way,  I  wrote  nothing.  I  had 
almost  lost  sight  of  the  man  and  his  book, 
when,  as  I  was  in  Paris  on  my  way  back 
from  Spain,  I  was  unexpectedly  reminded 
of  my  promise.  I  was  talking  with  Yvette 
Guilbert,  whose  knowledge  of  French  litera- 
ture has  often  surprised  me ;  but  I  was  never 
more  surprised  than  when  she  said,  a-propos 
of  nothing  at  all:  "Why  have  you  never 
translated  anything  from  Charles  Cros — 

78 


Cartoon  of  Charles  Cros 


A     BOOK     OF     FRENCH     VERSES 

you,  who  have  translated  so  many  things 
from  Verlaine  ?"  "But  do  you  know  Charles 
Cros?"  I  said,  forgetting  to  conceal  my  sur- 
prise. "But  I  adore  him,"  she  said,  and 
began  to  quote  his  verses.  I  promised  to 
translate  one  of  his  poems.  To-day  it  oc- 
curs to  me  to  keep  both  my  promises. 

Well,  as  I  turn  out  this  Sandal-wood 
Casket,  full  of  bibelots  d'emplois  incer- 
tains,  made  out  of  sour  ires,  fleurs,  baisers, 
essences,  I  seem  to  find  myself  at  that 
moment  in  French  literature  when  the 
Pamasse  was  becoming  not  less  artificially 
naive  and  perverse  at  once.  It  belongs  to 
the  period  of  Les  Amours  Jaunes  of  Tristan 
Corbiere  and  the  Rimes  de  Joie  of  Theodore 
Hannon,  both  of  which  you  will  find  praised 
and  defined  in  Huysmans*  A  Rebours;  but 
it  is  more  genuine,  and  more  genuinely 
poetical,  than  either.  Learning  much  from 
Gautier  in  his  form,  from  Baudelaire  for  his 
atmosphere,  and,  more  than  from  either, 
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COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

from  the  popular  songs  of  many  countries, 
he  seems  to  anticipate  Verlaine  in 

Des  choses  absurdes  vraiment, 

metre  and  sentiment.  And  yet  he  has  still 
the  habit  of  writing  in  which  boats  had 

Mat  de  nacre  et  voile  en  satin, 
Rames  d'ivoire. 

He  seems  at  times  to  be  accepting  every 
commonplace  of  poetry,  but  the  common- 
places turn  diaphanous  under  his  touch,  and 
come  to  us  with  little  pallid,  pathetic  graces, 
like  toys  in  tears,  or  as  if  Dresden  China 
shepherdesses  had  begun  to  weep. 

Ma  belle  amie  est  morte 
Et  voila  qu'on  la  porte 
En  terre,  ce  matin, 
En  souliers  de  satin. 

It  is  all  poetry  made  up  by  one  who  has 
lived  a  faint,  scarcely  passionate,  over-dainty 

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A     BOOK     OF     FRENCH     VERSES 

life  avec  les  fieurs,  avec  les  femmes.  You 
might  be  deceived  into  thinking  him  more 
real,  or  more  unreal,  than  he  is. 

Ce  n'est  plus  l'heure  des  tendresses 
Jalouses,  ni  des  faux  serments, 

but  of  a  kind  of  remembering  tenderness, 
in  which  there  is  something  of  the  senses, 
something  of  chaste  ideals,  and  more  self- 
pity  than  really  poignant  sorrow.  The  poem 
called  Lento,  perhaps  the  best  poem  in  the 
volume,  is  wonderfully  touching,  as  it  mur- 
murs almost  sobbingly  in  one's  ear,  going  on 
to  an  effect  really  of  slow  music,  in  its  deli- 
cate, returning  cadences.  It  gives  us,  in  its 
evasive,  whimsically  ironical  way,  a  sort  of 
philosophy  of  just  these  perfumed  sensations 
which  can  so  easily  turn  painful  or  over- 
powering. 

Mais  il  ne  faut  pas  croire  a  l'ame  des  contours, 

it  cries,  with  a  child's  surprise;  and  it  is 
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COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


with  a  darker,  more  macabre  sense  of  the 
soiling  mystery  of  death,  and  the  end  of 
beauty,  that  a  poem  called  Wasted  Words, 
which  I  have  translated  for  a  specimen, 
sums  up  the  attitude  of  the  universe  towards 
woman  and  of  woman  towards  the  uni- 
verse : — 

After  the  bath  the  chambermaid 

Combs  out  your  hair.    The  peignoir  falls 

In  pleated  folds.    You  turn  your  head 
To  hear  the  mirror's  madrigals. 

Does  not  the  mirror's  voice  remind 
Your  pride:    This  body,  fair  in  vain, 

Decrepit  shelter  of  a  kind 

Of  soul,  must  find  the  dust  again. 

Then  shall  this  delicate  flesh  forsake 
The  bones  it  veiled,  and  worms  intrude 

Where  all  is  emptiness,  and  make 
A  busy  nest  in  solitude 

There,  no  more  white ;  but  brown  earth  strewn 

Heavily  on  your  bony  cheeks. 
No  gleaming  lustres,  but  the  moon. 

These  are  the  words  your  mirror  speaks. 
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A     BOOK     OF     FRENCH     VERSES 

You  listen  with  a  soulless  smile, 

Too  proud  to  heed  the  thing  they  say; 

For  woman  mocks  at  time,  the  while 
To-morrow  feeds  on  yesterday. 

That  is  characteristic  enough,  in  its  touches 
of  old  sentiment  and  new,  in  its  not  unsuc- 
cessful aim  at  effect,  in  its  fantastic  moder- 
nity; but  it  is  more  emphatic  than  most  of 
these  poems,  which  are  indeed  at  times  as 
sharp  and  clear  as  a  Latin  epigram,  but 
more  often  vague,  floating,  really  songs,  and 
at  times  daintily  disquieting,  little  perfumed 
cries.  Perfume  is  indeed  the  word  that  re- 
turns oftenest  under  one's  pen  as  one  tries 
to  evoke  the  actual  atmosphere  of  these 
pages.  The  Sandal-wood  Casket  is  a  cab- 
inet of  scents,  or  contains  one,  scenting 
all  its  other  stuffs  and  trinkets.  Baudelaire 
has  taught  all  modern  poets  the  suggestive 
value  of  perfumes,  but  no  one  has  ever  used 
them  with  such  constant  and  elaborate 
felicity.     Exotic  always,  now  Chinese,  now 

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COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

Ethiopian,  now  gipsy,  now  the  discord  of  a 
night  of  insomnia,  now  the  penetrating,  un- 
real harmony  of  a  haschisch  dream,  per- 
fumes steam  up  out  of  all  these  pages;  yes, 
even  natural  perfumes,  out  of  the  hayfields 
and  hedges  of  the  real  country.  For  Charles 
Cros  is  not  so  morbid  as  one  is  at  first  in- 
clined to  suppose.  Is  it  really  with  any 
sincerity  that  he  says :  "Je  me  tue  a  vouloir 
me  civiliser  Tame?"  And  is  all  this  Parisian 
exoticism  really  a  kind  of  revenge  of  nature 
upon  one  not  naturally,  or  not  exclusively, 
limited  to  what  is  most  like  the  bibelot  in 
humanity?  At  all  events,  here,  in  the  midst 
of  these  tender,  and  fantastic,  and  pathetic 
sentimentalities,  are  the  delightfully  hu- 
morous Grains  de  Sel,  which  one  should 
have  heard  their  writer  sing  for  the  full 
enjoyment  of  them ;  the  Hareng  Saur,  which 
has  a  little  immortality  of  its  own,  among 
people  hardly  aware  whom  it  is  by;  the 
Chanson   de    Sculpteurs,    which    sums    up 

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A     BOOK     OF     FRENCH     VERSES 

Montmartre;  and  the  Brave  Homme,  which 
anticipates  Aristide  Bruant.  A  set  of  fifteen 
dizains  parodies  Coppee,  doing  his  Annals 
of  the  Poor  better  than  he  could  do  them. 
It  was  the  time  of  paradoxes  when  this  book 
was  written ;  it  has  indeed  always  been  very 
French,  and  in  every  time  very  modern,  to 
have  irony  or  humour  for  a  part  of  one's 
equipment  as  a  poet;  and  Charles  Cros  is 
very  French,  and  in  his  own  time  was  very 
modern. 
1899. 


85 


YVETTE  GUILBERT 


AT  THE  AMBASSADEURS 
To 

YVETTE   GUILBERT 

That  was  Yvette.    The  blithe  Ambassadeurs 
Glitters,  this  Sunday  of  the  Fete  des  Fleurs ; 
Here  are  the  flowers,  too,  living  flowers  that  blow 
A  night  or  two  before  the  odours  go; 
And  all  the  flowers  of  all  the  city  ways 
Are  laughing,  with  Yvette,  this  day  of  days. 
Laugh,  with  Yvette?    But  I  must  first  forget 
Before  I  laugh,  that  I  have  heard  Yvette. 
For  the  flowers  fade  before  her ;  see,  the  light 
Dies  out  of  that  poor  cheek,  and  leaves  it  white; 
She  sings  of  life,  and  mirth,  and  all  that  moves 
Man's  fancy  in  the  carnival  of  loves; 
And  a  chill  shiver  takes  me  as  she  sings 
The  pity  of  unpitied  human  things, 
1894. 


89 


YVETTE  GUILBERT 

She  is  tall,  thin,  a  little  angular,  most 
winningly  and  girlishly  awkward,  as  she 
wanders  on  to  the  stage  with  an  air  of  vague 
distraction.  Her  shoulders  droop,  her  arms 
hang  limply.  She  doubles  forward  in  an 
automatic  bow  in  response  to  the  thunders  of 
applause,  and  that  curious  smile  breaks  out 
along  her  lips  and  rises  and  dances  in  her 
bright-blue  eyes,  wide  open  in  a  sort  of 
child-like  astonishment.  Her  hair,  a  bright 
auburn,  rises  in  soft  masses  above  a  large 
pure  forehead.  She  wears  a  trailing  dress, 
striped  yellow  and  pink,  without  ornamenta- 
tion. Her  arms  are  covered  with  long  black 
gloves.  The  applause  stops  suddenly ;  there 
is  a  hush  of  suspense;  she  is  beginning  to 
sing. 

And  with  the  first  note  you  realize  the 
difference  between  Yvette  Guilbert  and  all 
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COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

the  rest  of  the  world.  A  sonnet  by  Mr. 
Andre  Raffalovich  states  just  that  difference 
so  subtly  that  I  must  quote  it  to  help  out  my 
interpretation : — 

If  you  want  hearty  laughter,  country  mirth — 

Or  frantic  gestures  of  an  acrobat, 
Heels  over  head — or  floating  lace  skirts  worth 

I  know  not  what,  a  large  eccentric  hat 
And  diamonds,  the  gift  of  some  dull  boy — 

Then  when  you  see  her  do  not  wrong  Yvette, 
Because  Yvette  is  not  a  clever  toy, 

A  tawdry  doll  in  fairy  limelight  set. 
And  should  her  song  sound  cynical  and  base 

At  first,  herself  ungainly,  or  her  smile 
Monotonous — wait,  listen,  watch  her  face: 

The  sufferings  of  those  the  world  calls  vile 
She  sings,  and  as  you  watch  Yvette  Guilbert, 
You  too  will  shiver,  seeing  their  despair. 

Now  to  me  Yvette  Guilbert  was  exquisite 
from  the  first  moment.  "Exquisite !"  I  said 
under  my  breath,  as  I  first  saw  her  come 
upon  the  stage.  She  sang  Sainte  Galette, 
and  as  I  listened  to  the  song  I  felt  a  cold 
92 


YVETTE     GUILBERT 


shiver  run  down  my  back,  that  frisson  which 
no  dramatic  art,  save  that  of  Sarah  Bern- 
hardt, had  ever  given  me.  I  had  heard  about 
her,  but  it  was  not  quite  this  that  I  was 
expecting,  so  poignant,  so  human,  that  I 
could  scarcely  endure  the  pity  of  it.  It  made 
me  feel  that  I  was  wicked ;  I,  to  have  looked 
at  these  dreadfully  serious  things  lightly. 
But  it  is  not  by  her  personal  charm  that  she 
thrills  you,  and  I  admit  that  her  personal 
charm  could  be  called  in  question.  It  must  be 
said,  too,  that  she  can  do  pure  comedy — that 
she  can  be  merely,  deliciously  gay.  There  is 
one  of  her  songs  in  which  she  laughs,  chuckles, 
and  trills  a  rapid  flurry  of  broken  words 
and  phrases,  with  the  sudden,  spontaneous, 
irresponsible  mirth  of  a  bird.  But  where 
she  is  most  herself  is  in  a  manner  of  tragic 
comedy  which  has  never  been  seen  on  the 
music-hall  stage  from  the  beginning.  It  is 
the  profoundly  sad  and  essentially  serious 
comedy  which  one  sees  in  Forain's  marvel- 
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COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


lous  designs — those  rapid  outlines  which, 
with  the  turn  of  a  pencil,  give  you  the  whole 
existence  of  those  base  sections  of  society 
which  our  art  in  England  is  mainly  forced 
to  ignore.  People  call  the  art  of  Forain 
immoral,  they  call  Yvette  Guilbert's  songs 
immoral.  That  is  merely  the  conventional 
misuse  of  a  conventional  word.  The  art  of 
Yvette  Guilbert  is  certainly  the  art  of  real- 
ism. She  brings  before  you  the  real  life 
drama  of  the  streets,  of  the  pot-house;  she 
shows  you  the  seamy  side  of  life  behind  the 
scenes ;  she  calls  things  by  their  right  names. 
But  there  is  not  a  touch  of  sensuality  about 
her,  she  is  neither  contaminated  nor  con- 
taminating by  what  she  sings ;  she  is  simply 
a  great,  impersonal,  dramatic  artist,  who 
sings  realism  as  others  write  it. 

In  one  of  her  songs,  Sainte  Galette,  she 

represents  a  denizen  of  the  Quartier  Breda, 

praying  in  her  room,  at  nightfall,  to  "Our 

Lady    of    Cash" — the    great    omnipotent 

94 


YVETTE     GUILBERT 


"Sainte  Galette."  The  verses  are  really 
powerful;  the  music,  a  sort  of  dirge  or 
litany,  is  intensely  pathetic.  And  as  Yvette 
Guilbert  sings,  in  her  quiet,  thrilling  voice, 
which  becomes  harsher,  for  effect,  in  the 
lower  notes,  which  becomes  a  moan,  an  ab- 
solute heart-breaking  moan,  in  that  recur- 
rent cry  of  "Sainte  Galette,"  it  is  the  note 
of  sheer  tragedy  that  she  strikes.  She 
literally  shook  me ;  she  made  me  shiver ;  she 
brought  tears  to  my  eyes.  In  Je  suis 
pocharde — where  the  words  are  more  com- 
monplace— Yvette  Guilbert  brings  into  what 
might  so  easily  be  a  merely  vulgar  repre- 
sentation of  a  drunken  woman  something  of 
that  tragic  savour  which  gives  artistic  value 
as  well  as  moral  sanction  to  her  most  hazard- 
ous assumptions.  Her  gamut  in  the  purely 
comic  is  wide ;  with  an  inflection  of  the  voice, 
a  bend  of  that  curious  long  thin  body  which 
seems  to  be  embodied  gesture,  she  can  sug- 
gest, she  can  portray,  the  humour  that  is 
95 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

dry,  ironical,  coarse  (I  will  admit),  unctuous 
even.  Her  voice  can  be  sweet  or  harsh;  it 
can  chirp,  lilt,  chuckle,  stutter;  it  can  moan 
or  laugh,  be  tipsy  or  distinguished.  No- 
where is  she  conventional ;  nowhere  does  she 
even  resemble  any  other  French  singer. 
Voice,  face,  gestures,  pantomime — all  are 
different,  all  are  purely  her  own.  She  is  a 
creature  of  contrasts,  and  suggests  at  once 
all  that  is  innocent  and  all  that  is  perverse. 
She  has  the  pure  blue  eyes  of  a  child,  eyes 
that  are  cloudless,  that  gleam  with  a  wicked 
ingenuousness,  that  close  in  the  utter  abase- 
ment of  weariness,  that  open  wide  in  all  the 
expressionlessness  of  surprise.  Her  naivete 
is  perfect,  and  perfect,  too,  is  that  strange 
subtle  smile  of  comprehension  that  closes 
the  period.  A  great  impersonal  artist,  de- 
pending as  she  does  entirely  on  her  expres- 
sive power,  her  dramatic  capabilities,  her 
gift  for  being  moved,  for  rendering  the  emo- 
tions of  those  in  whom  we  do  not  look  for 

96 


;- 


ill      '      t&/ 


ft    ' 


A\   III 


!  i  ill 


-C.., 


'k4*6L  yfL^&^s 


Sketch  of  Yvette  Guilbert 


YVETTE     GUILBERT 


just  that  kind  of  emotion,  she  affects  one 
all  the  time  as  being,  after  all,  removed  from 
what  she  sings  of — an  artist  whose  sym- 
pathy is  an  instinct,  a  divination.  There  is 
something  automatic  in  all  fine  histrionic 
genius,  and  I  find  some  of  the  charm  of  the 
automaton  in  Yvette  Guilbert.  The  real 
woman,  one  fancies,  is  the  slim,  bright-haired 
girl  who  looks  so  pleased  and  so  amused 
when  you  applaud  her,  and  whom  it  pleases 
to  please  you  just  because  it  is  amusing. 
She  could  not  tell  you  how  she  happens  to 
be  a  great  artist ;  how  she  has  found  a  voice 
for  the  tragic  comedy  of  cities;  how  it  is 
that  she  makes  you  cry  when  she  sings  of 
sordid  miseries.  "That  is  her  secret,"  we 
are  accustomed  to  say ;  and  I  like  to  imagine 
that  it  is  a  secret  which  she  herself  has  never 
fathomed. 

The  difference  between  Yvette  Guilbert 
and  every  other  singer  on  the  variety  stage 
is  the  difference  between  Sarah  Bernhardt 
97 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


and  every  other  actress.  There  are  plenty 
of  women  who  sing  comic  songs  with  talent : 
here  is  a  woman  who  sings  a  new  tragic 
variety  of  comedy  and  sings  it  with  genius. 
The  word  "creation"  has  come  to  have  a 
casual  enough  meaning  in  regard  to  any 
new  performance  on  the  stage,  but  in  this 
case  it  is  an  epithet  of  simple  justice.  This 
new,  subtle,  tourmentee  way  of  singing  the 
miseries  of  the  poor  and  the  vices  of  the 
miserable  is  absolutely  a  creation;  it  brings 
at  once  a  new  order  of  subject  and  a 
novel  manner  of  presentment  into  the  comic 
repertoire,  and  it  lifts  the  entertainment  of 
the  music-hall  into  a  really  high  region  of 
art.  To  hear  her  sing  six  songs,  all  quite 
different  in  tone — La  Petite  Curieuse, 
La  Terre,  Beranger's  Lisette,  Morphinee, 
Les  Demoiselles  a  Marier,  and  Qa  fait 
toujours  plaisir,  is  to  realise  how  wide 
her  range  is.  One  song,  for  instance, 
La  Terre,  which  is  serious  to  the  point 

98 


YVETTE     GUILBERT 


of  solemnity,  and  in  which  the  whole  effect 
consists  in  the  deep  feeling  and  the  delicately 
varied  intonation  given  to  the  refrain  at 
every  recurrence,  gave  me  much  more 
pleasure  than  Beranger's  Lisette,  the 
"grisette  de  quinze  ans."  Morphinee  is 
sheer  tragedy;  it  is  a  song  by  that  clever, 
eccentric,  never  quite  satisfactory  person, 
Jean  Lorrain,  and  it  tells  all  the  horror  of 
a  life  enslaved  by  morphine.  Words  and 
music  are  singularly  apt  and  mutually  ex- 
pressive, and  the  rise  of  the  voice,  into  a 
sort  of  dull,  yet  intense  monotony,  at  the 
words  "je  suis  hallucinee,"  is  one  of  the 
most  thrilling  effects  that  even  Yvette  has 
ever  obtained.  The  whole  thing — sordid, 
horrible,  crazed,  as  it  is — is,  as  a  piece  of 
acting,  incomparably  expressive,  and  it  is 
always  restrained  within  the  severest  artistic 
limits.  La  Petite  Curieuse  and  fa  fait 
toujours  plaisir  are  more  conventional,  as 
songs;  slight,  neatly  done,  quite  finished  in 
99 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


their  way,  and  with  some  of  that  perverse 
naivete  which  was,  I  believe,  Yvette  Gil- 
bert's earliest  discovery  in  method.  Les 
Demoiselles  a  Marier,  the  most  cynical  and 
subtle  of  her  studies  in  the  young  lady  of 
the  period,  carries  this  method  to  a  far  finer 
perfection.  In  what  it  says  and  what  it  sug- 
gests it  is  excessively  piquant:  really  witty, 
with  a  distinctively  French  wit,  it  has  all  the 
fine  malice  of  Les  Demoiselles  de  Pen- 
sionat,  and  an  even  finer,  because  a  more 
varied,  expressiveness.  It  is  in  this  ex- 
pressiveness that  the  secret  of  Yvette  Guil- 
bert  lies,  and  the  secret  of  the  expressive- 
ness is,  partly,  a  conscientious  attention  to 
detail.  Other  people  are  content  with  mak- 
ing an  effect,  say,  twice  in  the  course  of  a 
song.  Yvette  insists  on  getting  the  full 
meaning  out  of  every  line,  and,  with  her,  to 
grasp  a  meaning  is  to  have  found  an  effect. 
It  is  genius,  which  must  be  born,  not  made ; 
and  it  is  also  that  "infinite  capacity  for  tak- 

IOO 


YVETTE     GUILBERT 


ing  pains."  I  remember  her  saying  to  me, 
"Other  women  are  just  as  clever  as  I  am, 
but  if  I  make  up  my  mind  that  I  will  do  a 
thing  I  always  do  it.  I  try,  and  try,  and 
try,  until  I  succeed."  There  the  true  artist 
spoke,  and  the  quality  I  claim  for  Yvette 
Guilbert,  above  all  other  qualities,  is  that 
she  is  a  true  artist,  an  artist  as  genuine,  and 
in  her  own  way  as  great,  as  any  actress  on 
any  stage. 
1900. 


101 


DANCERS  AND  DANCING 


• 


LA  MELINITE:   MOULIN-ROUGE. 

Olivier  Metra's  Waltz  of  Roses 
Sheds  in  a  rhythmic  shower 
The  very  petals  of  the  flower; 
And  all  is  roses, 
The  rouge  of  petals  in  a  shower. 

Down  the  long  hall  the  dance  returning 

Rounds  the  full  circle,  rounds 

The  perfect  rose  of  lights  and  sounds, 

The  rose  returning 

Into  the  circle  Gf  its  rounds. 

Alone,  apart,  one  dancer  watches 
Her  mirrored,  morbid  grace ; 
Before  the  mirror,  face  to  face, 
Alone  she  watches 
Her  morbid,  vague,  ambiguous  grace. 

Before  the  mirror's  dance  of  shadows 

She  dances  in  a  dream, 

And  she  and  they  together  seem 

A  dance  of  shadows, 

Alike  the  shadows  of  a  dream. 

105 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


The  orange-rosy  lamps  are  trembling 

Between  the  robes  that  turn; 

In  ruddy  flowers  of  flame  that  burn 

The  lights  are  trembling: 

The  shadows  and  the  dancers  turn. 

And,  enigmatically  smiling, 
In  the  mysterious  night, 
She  dances  for  her  own  delight, 
A  shadow  smiling 
Back  to  a  shadow  in  the  night. 
1892. 


106 


DANCERS  AND  DANCING 


It  was  in  May,  1892,  that,  having  crossed 
the  streets  of  Paris  from  the  hotel  where  I 
was  staying,  the  Hotel  Corneille,  in  the  Latin 
Quarter  (made  famous  by  Balzac  in  his 
superb  story,  Z.  Marcas),  I  found  myself 
in  Le  Jardin  de  Paris  where  I  saw  for  the 
first  time  La  Melinite.  She  danced  in  a 
quadrille:  young  and  girlish,  the  more  pro- 
vocative because  she  played  as  a  prude, 
with  an  assumed  modesty;  dScollette  nearly 
to  the  waist,  in  the  Oriental  fashion.  She 
had  long  black  curls  around  her  face;  and 
had  about  her  a  depraved  virginity. 

And  she  caused  in  me,  even  then,  a  curious 

sense  of  depravity  that  perhaps  comes  into 

the  verses  I  wrote  on  her.    There,  certainly, 

on  the  night  of  May  22d,  danced  in  her 

107 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

feverish,  her  perverse,  her  enigmatical 
beauty,  La  Melinite,  to  her  own  image  in  the 
mirror : 

"A  shadow  smiling 
Back  to  a  shadow  in  the  night": 

as  she  cadenced  Olivier  Metra's  Valse  des 
Roses. 

The  chahut,  which  she  danced,  is  the  suc- 
cessor, one  might  almost  say  the  renaissance, 
of  the  cancan.  Roughly  speaking,  the  can- 
can died  with  the  Bal  Mabille,  the  chahut 
was  born  with  the  Jardin  de  Paris.  The 
effervescent  Bal  Bullier  of  the  Quartier 
Latin,  in  its  change  from  the  Closerie  des 
Lilas,  of  the  days  of  Murger,  may  be  said 
to  have  kept  the  tradition  of  the  thing,  and, 
with  the  joyous  and  dilapidated  Moulin  de 
la  Galette  of  the  heights  of  Montmartre,  to 
have  led  the  way  in  the  establishment  of 
the  present  school  of  dancing.  But  it  was 
at  the  Jardin  de  Paris,  about  the  year  1884, 
108 


Folies-Bergere  Poster 


DANCERS     AND     DANCING 


that  the  chahut,  or  the  quadrille  natural- 
iste,  made  its  appearance,  and,  with  La 
Goulue  and  Grille-d'figout,  came  to  stay. 
The  dance  is  simply  a  quadrille  in  delirium 
— a  quadrille  in  which  the  steps  are  punctu- 
ated by  le  port  d'armes  (or  high  kicks), 
with  le  grand  ecart  (or  "the  splits")  for 
parenthesis.  Le  port  d'armes  is  done  by 
standing  on  one  foot  and  holding  the  other 
upright  in  the  air;  le  grand  ecart  by  sitting 
on  the  floor  with  the  legs  absolutely  hori- 
zontal. Beyond  these  two  fundamental  rules 
of  the  game,  everything  almost  is  left  to  the 
fantasy  of  the  performer,  and  the  fantasy 
of  the  whirling  people  of  the  Moulin  Rouge, 
the  Casino,  the  Jardin  de  Paris,  the  Elysee 
Montmartre,  is  free,  fertile,  and  peculiar. 
Even  in  Paris  you  must  be  somewhat  ultra- 
modern to  appreciate  it,  and  to  join,  night 
after  night,  those  avid  circles  which  form 
so  rapidly,  here  and  there  on  the  ball-room 
floor,  as  a  waltz-rhythm  ends,  and  a  placard 
109 


COLOUR     STUDIES   IN    PARIS 


bearing  the  word  "Quadrille"  is  hung  out 
from  the  musicians*  gallery. 

Of  all  the  stars  of  the  chahut,  the  most 
charming,  the  most  pleasing,  is  La  Goulue. 
Still  young,  though  she  has  been  a  choreo- 
graphic celebrity  for  seven  or  eight  years; 
still  fresh,  a  veritable  "queen  of  curds  and 
cream"  among  the  too  white  and  the  too  red 
women  of  the  Moulin  Rouge;  she  has  that 
simple,  ingenuous  air  which  is,  perhaps,  the 
last  refinement,  to  the  perverse,  of  per- 
versity. To  dance  the  chahut,  to  dance  it 
with  infinite  excitement,  and  to  look  like  a 
milkmaid:  that,  surely,  is  a  triumph  of 
natural  genius!  Grille-d'Egout,  her  com- 
panion and  rival,  is  not  so  interesting.  She 
is  dark,  serious,  correct,  perfectly  accom- 
plished in  her  art,  and  a  professor  of  it,  but 
she  has  not  the  high  spirits,  the  entrain,  the 
attractiveness,  of  La  Goulue.  In  Nini- 
Patte-en-1'Air,  a  later,  though  an  older, 
leader  of  the  quadrille  naturaliste,  and,  like 
no 


DANCERS     AND     DANCING 


Grille-dugout,  a  teacher  of  eccentric  danc- 
ing, we  find,  perhaps,  the  most  typical  repre- 
sentative of  the  chahut  of  to-day.  She  is 
not  young,  she  is  not  pretty,  she  is  thin, 
short  of  stature,  dark,  with  heavy  eyebrows, 
coarse,  irregular  features.  Her  face  is  worn 
and  haggard,  almost  ghastly;  her  mouth  is 
drawn  into  an  acute,  ambiguous,  ironical 
smile ;  her  roving  eyes  have  a  curious,  intent 
glitter.  She  has  none  of  the  gaminerie  of 
La  Goulue:  hers  is  a  severely  self-conscious 
art,  and  all  her  extravagances  are  perfectly 
deliberate.  But  with  what  mastery  they  are 
done,  with  what  tireless  agility,  what  tire- 
less ingenuity  in  invention!  Always  cold, 
collected,  "the  Maenad  of  the  Decadence," 
it  is  with  a  sort  of  "learned  fury"  that  she 
dances;  and  she  has  a  particular  trick — the 
origin  of  her  nickname — a  particular  quiver 
of  the  foot  as  the  leg  is  held  rigid  in  the 
air — which  is  her  sign  and  signature.  After 
these  three  distinguished  people  come  many, 
in 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


There  is  La  Melinite,  Rayon-d'Or,  La 
Sauterelle,  Etoile  Filante,  and  many  another; 
of  whom  La  Melinite  is  certainly  the  most 
interesting.  She  is  tall,  slim,  boyish  in 
figure,  decolletee  in  the  Eastern  fashion,  in 
a  long  slit;  she  dances  with  a  dreamy  ab- 
sorption, a  conventional  air,  as  of  perverted 
sanctity,  remote,  ambiguous.  And  then 
there  is  La  Macarona  of  the  Elysee-Mont- 
martre,  whose  sole  title  to  distinction  lies  in 
the  extraordinary  effrontery  of  her  costume. 


II 


On  my  way  to  Nini-Patte-en-l'Air's  I 
stopped  at  a  second-hand  bookstall,  where 
I  purchased  a  particular  edition  which  I  had 
long  been  seeking,  of  a  certain  edifying  work 
of  great  repute.  Opening  the  book  at  ran- 
dom, I  found  myself  at  Chapter  XX.,  De 
Amore   Solitudinis   et  Silenti.     "Relinque 

112 


DANCERS     AND     DANCING 


curiosa,"  I  read.  Then  I  put  the  book  in 
my  pocket  and  went  on  to  Nini-Patte-en- 
l'Air's. 

Of  course,  I  had  been  at  the  Trafalgar 
Square  Theatre — two  Saturdays  ago,  was  it 
not? — when  the  unaccountable  British  pub- 
lic had  applauded  so  frankly  and  so  vigor- 
ously its  first  glimpse  of  a  quadrille  natural- 
iste  in  England.  But  now  I  was  going, 
in  response  to  a  special  invitation  from 
Madame  Nini,  to  see  what  I  fancied  would 
interest  me  far  more,  a  private  lesson  in  the 
art  of  the  chahut.  I  found  the  hotel,  but 
not,  at  first,  the  front  door.  In  the  bar  no 
one  knew  of  a  front  door,  but  I  might  go 
upstairs,  they  said,  if  I  liked:  that  way, 
through  the  door  on  the  right.  I  went  up- 
stairs, found  a  waiter,  and  presently  Nini- 
Patte-en-1'Air  bustled  into  the  room,  and 
told  me  to  make  myself  quite  at  home.  Nini 
is  charming,  with  her  intense  nervous  vi- 
vacity, her  quaint  seriousness,  her  little 
ii3 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


professional  airs;  befitting  the  directress  of 
the  sole  ecole  du  chahut  at  present  existing 
in  the  world.  We  have  all  seen  her  on  the 
stage,  and  the  little,  plain,  thick-set  woman 
with  the  vivid  eyes  and  the  enigmatic  mouth, 
is  just  the  same  on  the  stage  and  off.  She 
is  the  same  because  she  has  an  individuality 
of  her  own,  which  gives  her,  in  her  own  kind 
of  dancing,  a  place  apart — an  individuality 
which  is  reinforced  by  a  degree  of  accom- 
plishment to  which  neither  La  Goulue  nor 
Grille-d'£gout,  neither  La  Sauterelle  nor 
Rayon-d'Or,  can  for  a  moment  pretend. 
And  I  found  that  she  takes  herself  very 
seriously;  that  she  is  justly  proud  of  being 
the  only  chahut  dancer  who  has  made  an  art 
out  of  a  caprice,  as  well  as  the  only  one  who 
has  conquered  all  the  difficulties  of  her  own 
making,  the  only  executant  at  once  faultless 
and  brilliant.  We  talked  of  many  things,  I 
of  Paris  and  she  of  London,  for  which  she 
professes  an  immense  enthusiasm;  then  she 
114 


DANCERS     AND     DANCING 


told  me  of  her  triumphant  tour  in  America, 
and  how  she  conquered  America  by  the 
subtle  discretion  of  her  dessous,  which  were 
black.  Blue,  pink,  yellow,  white,  she  experi- 
mented with  all  colours;  but  the  American 
standpoint  was  only  precisely  found  and 
flattered  by  the  factitious  reserve  of  black. 
Then,  as  she  explained  to  me  all  the  tech- 
nique of  her  art,  she  would  jump  up  from 
the  armchair  in  which  she  was  sitting,  shoot 
a  sudden  leg,  surprisingly,  into  the  air,  and 
do  the  grand  ecart  on  the  hearthrug.  But 
the  pupils?  Oh,  the  pupils  were  coming; 
and  Madame  and  I  had  just  finished  moving 
the  heavy  oak  table  into  a  corner,  when  the 
door  opened,  and  they  came  in. 

I  was  introduced,  firstly,  to  La  Tene- 
breuse,  a  big  woman  of  long  experience, 
whom  I  found  to  be  more  supple  than  her 
figure  indicated.  Eglantine  came  next,  a 
tall,  strong,  handsome,  dignified-looking  girl, 
with  dark  eyes  and  eyebrows;  she  is  in  her 
US 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


second  year,  and  has  been  with  Nini  in 
America.  Then  came  £pi-d'Or,  a  timid,  yet 
gay,  rather  English  little  blonde,  who  makes 
her  debut  in  London.  They  sat  down 
meekly,  like  good  little  school-girls,  and  each 
came  forward  as  she  was  called,  went 
through  her  exercises,  and  returned  to  her 
seat  by  the  door.  And  those  exercises!  It 
was  not  a  large  room,  and  when  a  tall  girl 
lay  at  full  length  on  the  floor,  and  Nini  bent 
over  her,  seized  one  of  her  legs,  and  worked 
it  about  as  if  it  were  a  piece  of  india-rubber, 
the  space  seemed  quite  sufficiently  occupied. 
When  Eglantine  took  her  third  step  towards 
me,  kicking  her  hand  on  the  level  of  her 
eyes  at  each  step,  I  tried  to  push  back  my 
chair  a  little  closer  to  the  wall,  in  case  of 
accidents;  and  the  big  girl,  La  Tenebreuse, 
when  she  did  the  culbute,  or  somersault, 
ending  with  the  grand  ecart,  or  the  splits, 
finished  at,  almost  on,  my  feet.  I  saw  the 
preparatory  exercises,  le  brisement,  or  dis- 
116 


DANCERS     AND     DANCING 


location,  and  la  serie,  or  the  high-kick,  done 
by  two  in  concert;  and  then  the  different 
poses  of  the  actual  dance  itself:  la  guitare, 
in  which  the  leg  is  held  almost  at  right 
angles  with  the  body,  the  ankle  supported 
by  one  hand;  le  port  d'armes,  in  which  the 
leg  is  held  upright,  one  hand  clasping  the 
heel  of  the  boot — a  position  of  great  diffi- 
culty, on  which  le  salut  militaire  is  a  slight 
variation;  la  Jambe  derriere  la  tete,  a  posi- 
tion which  requires  the  most  elaborate  acro- 
batic training,  and  which  is  perhaps  as  pain- 
ful to  see  as  it  must  be  to  do ;  le  croisement, 
which  ends  a  figure  and  is  done  by  two  or 
four  dancers,  forming  a  sort  of  cross-pat- 
tern by  holding  their  heels  together  in  the 
air,  on  a  level  with  the  eyes;  and  le  grand 
ecart,  or  the  splits,  which  is  done  either  by 
gliding  gradually  out  (the  usual  method), 
or  by  a  sudden  jump  in  which  the  split  is 
done  in  the  air,  and  the  body  falls  violently 
to  the  ground,  like  a  pair  of  compasses  which 
117 


i  COLOUR    STUDIES    IN     PARIS 

have  opened  out  by  their  own  weight.  It 
was  all  very  instructive,  very  curious,  very 
amusing.  "Relinque  curiosa,"  said  the  book 
in  my  pocket.  But  I  was  far  from  being 
in  that  monastic  mood  as  I  watched  these 
extraordinary  contortions,  done  so  blithely, 
yet  so  seriously,  by  Tenebreuse,  Eglantine, 
and  fipi-d'Or;  Nini-Pattee-en-l'Air  giving 
her  orders  with  that  professional  air  now 
more  fixed  than  ever  on  her  attentive  face. 
It  was  all  so  discreet,  after  a  fashion,  in  its 
methodical  order;  so  comically  indiscreet,  in 
another  sense.  I  am  avid  of  impressions 
and  sensations;  and  here,  certainly,  was  a 
new  sensation,  an  impression  of  something 
not  easily  to  be  seen  elsewhere.  I  sat  and 
pondered,  my  chair  pushed  close  back  to  the 
wall,  Nini-Patte-en-1'Air  by  my  side,  and  be- 
fore me  Tenebreuse,  Eglantine,  and  £pi- 
d'Or. 
1897. 


118 


LEON  BLOY: 
THE  THANKLESS  BEGGAR 


• 


LEON  BLOY:  THE  THANKLESS 
BEGGAR 

The  writer  whom  Octave  Mirabeau  has 
called  le  plus  somptueux  ecrivain  de  notre 
temps,  of  whom  Remy  de  Gourmont  has  said 
that  he  is  un  de  plus  grands  createurs 
d' images  que  la  terre  ait  portes,  is  indeed 
"himself  remarkable."  In  Le  Mendiant  In- 
grat,  a  journal  kept  during  the  years  1892- 
1895,  which  forms  a  sort  of  autobiography, 
he  writes:  "J'ai  vecu,  sans  vergogne,  dans 
une  extreme  solitude,  peuplee  des  ressenti- 
ments  et  des  desirs  fauves  que  mon  execra- 
tion des  contemporains  enfantait,  ecrivant  ou 
vociferant  ce  qui  me  paraissait  juste.  Ecri- 
vant ou  vociferant,"  for  the  writing  of  this 
strange  pamphleteer  of  genius  is  at  times  an 
almost  inarticulate  cry  of  rage  or  of  disgust. 
"Je  suis  Tenclume  au  fond  du  gouffre,"  he 
121 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


cries,  in  a  letter  to  Henry  de  Groux,  written 
at  a  time  when  his  wife,  believed  to  be  at  the 
point  of  death,  had  received  extreme  unc- 
tion, "l'enclume  de  Dieu,  qui  me  fait  soufTrir 
ainsi  parce  qu'il  m'aime,  je  le  sais  bien. 
L/enclume  de  Dieu,  au  fond  du  gouffre! 
Soit.  C'est  une  bonne  place  pour  retentir  vers 
Lui."  In  the  dedication  of  his  new  book 
he  invites  a  friend  to  make  his  escape  "des 
Lieux  Communs  ou  Ton  dine  pour  venir 
heroiquement  ronger  avec  moi  des  cranes 
d'imbeciles  dans  la  solitude."  It  is  a  dish  on 
which  he  has  sharpened  his  teeth  all  his  life, 
and  his  hunger  is  deadly.  Bloy  tells  us  that 
he  lives  entirely  on  alms,  and  he  affirms  that 
it  is  the  duty  of  man  toward  man,  and  espe- 
cially of  Christian  toward  Christian,  to 
supply  the  need  of  one  whose  poverty  is  hon- 
ourable. "Pourquoi  voudrait-on  que  je  ne 
m'honorasse  pas  d'avoir  ete  un  mendiant,  et, 
surtout,  un  'mendiant  ingrat  ?'  "  His  journal 
is  the  journal  of  Lazarus  at  the  gate,  lifting 
122 


LEON    bloy:    the    thankless    beggar 

up  his  voice  against  the  rich  man  who  has 
thrown  him  the  crumbs  from  his  table. 
Here  is  no  anarchism,  no  political  or  social 
grievance ;  it  is  the  outcry  of  a  Catholic  and 
an  aristocrat  of  letters,  unable  to  "make  his 
way  in  the  world,"  because  he  will  not  "pros- 
titute himself"  to  any  servile  or  lying  tasks. 
Has  a  man  the  right  to  claim  his  right  to 
live,  and  to  claim  it  without  shame,  and 
without  gratitude  to  the  giver  for  more  than 
the  spirit  of  the  gift?  That  is  the  problem 
which  Bloy  sets  before  us.  Bloy  is  a  fervent 
Catholic,  he  believes  in  God,  he  believes  that 
the  promises  of  the  Bible  are  to  be  taken 
literally,  and  that,  literally,  "the  Lord  will 
provide"  for  his  servants.  Man,  in  alms- 
giving, is  but  the  instrument,  often  the  un- 
willing instrument,  of  God ;  Bloy  is  therefore 
ready  to  receive  help  from  his  enemies  and 
to  bastonade  his  friends,  in  perfect  good 
faith.  "I  recognise  a  friend,"  he  says 
simply,  "by  his  giving  me  money."  He  is 
123 


COLOUR    STUDIES    IN     PARIS 


the  living  statement  of  the  dependence  of 
man  on  man,  that  is,  of  man  on  God,  who 
can  act  only  through  man.  Where  he  is 
alone  is  in  his  pride  in  that  humiliation  of 
himself,  and  in  his  insistence  on  the  duty 
of  others  to  give  him  what  he  is  in  need  of. 
The  most  eloquent  of  his  pleadings  against 
the  world's  commonplaces  is  No.  CXLIV, 
Avoir  du  pain  sur  la  planche.  Quand  il  n'y 
en  a  que  quelques  miettes,  he  says,  ga  se 
mange  encore.  Quand  il  y  en  a  trop,  ga  ne 
se  mange  pas  du  tout,  ga  devient  des  pierres 
et  c'est  avec  le  pain  sur  la  planche  des  bour- 
geois de  Jerusalem  que  jut  lapide  le  proto- 
martyr. 

But  it  is  not  merely  in  his  quality  of  man 
and  of  Christian  that  Bloy  demands  alms,  it 
is  as  the  prophet  and  familiar  friend  of 
God.  I  do  not  doubt  Bloy's  sincerity  in  be- 
lieving that  he  has  a  "message"  to  the  world. 
His  message,  he  tells  us,  is  de  notifier  la 
gloire  de  Dieu,  and  it  is  to  notify  the  glory 
124 


LEON    bloy:    the    thankless    beggar 


of  God  by  spoiling  the  Egyptians,  scourging 
the  money  changers  out  of  the  Temple,  and 
otherwise  helping  to  cleanse  the  gutters  of 
creation.  It  is  his  mission  to  be  a  scavenger, 
and  to  spare  the  cesspool  of  a  friend  who 
might  be  useful,  or  the  dunghill  of  an  em- 
ployer who  has  been  useful,  materially, 
would  be  an  act  almost  criminal.  With  this 
conviction  in  his  soul,  with  a  flaming  and 
devouring  temperament  which  must  prey  on 
something  if  it  is  not  to  prey  mortally  on 
itself,  it  is  not  unnatural  that  he  has  never 
been  able  to  "write  for  money."  The  artist 
may  indeed  write  for  money,  with  only 
comparative  harm  to  himself  or  to  his  art. 
He  permits  himself  to  do  something  which 
he  accounts  of  secondary  importance.  But 
the  prophet,  who  is  a  voice,  must  always  cry 
his  message ;  to  change  a  syllable  of  his  mes- 
sage is  to  sin  the  unpardonable  sin.  With 
him  whatever  is  not  absolute  truth,  truth  to 
conviction,  is  a  wilful  lie. 
125 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


Bloy's  Exegese  des  Lieux  Communs  is  a 
crucifixion  of  the  bourgeois  on  a  cross  of 
the  bourgeois*  own  making.  Now  it  is  to 
the  bourgeois,  after  all,  that  Bloy  appeals  for 
alms,  and  it  is  from  the  bourgeois  that  he 
receives  it,  as  he  declares  (and,  indeed, 
proves)  "thanklessly."  I  am  not  sure  that 
the  conventional  estimation  oi  gratitude  as 
one  of  the  main  virtues,  of  gratitude  in  all 
circumstances  and  for  all  favours  received, 
has  not  a  profoundly  bourgeois  origin.  I 
have  never  been  able  clearly  to  recognise  the 
necessity,  or  even  the  possibility,  of  grati- 
tude towards  anyone  for  whom  I  have  not 
a  feeling  of  personal  affection,  quite  apart 
from  any  exchange  of  benefits.  The  con- 
ferring what  is  called  a  favour,  materially, 
and  the  prompt  return  of  a  delicate  senti- 
ment, gratitude,  seems  to  me  a  kind  of  com- 
mercialism of  the  mind,  a  mere  business 
transaction,  in  which  an  honest  exchange  is 
not  always  either  possible  or  needful.  The 
126 


LEON    bloy:    the    thankless    beggar 

demand  for  gratitude  in  return  for  a  gift 
comes  largely  from  the  respect  which  most 
people  have  for  money;  from  the  idea  that 
money  is  the  most  "serious"  tiling  in  the 
world,  instead  of  an  accident,  a  compromise, 
the  symbol  of  a  physical  necessity,  but  a 
thing  having  no  real  existence  in  itself,  no 
real  importance  to  the  mind  which  refuses 
to  realise  its  existence.  Only  the  miser 
really  possesses  it  in  itself,  in  any  significant 
way;  for  the  miser  is  an  idealist,  the  poet 
of  gold.  To  all  others  it  is  a  kind  of  mathe- 
matics, and  a  synonym  for  being  "re- 
spected." You  may  say  it  is  necessary,  al- 
most as  necessary  as  breathing,  and  I  will 
not  deny  it.  Only  I  will  deny  that  anyone 
can  be  actively  grateful  for  the  power  of 
breathing.  He  cannot  conceive  of  himself 
without  that  power.  To  conceive  of  oneself 
without  money,  that  is  to  say  without  the 
means  of  going  on  living,  is  at  once  to  con- 
ceive of  the  right,  the  mere  human  right, 
127 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

to  assistance.  If,  in  addition  to  that  mere 
human  right,  one  is  convinced  that  one  is  a 
man  of  genius,  the  right  becomes  more 
plainly  evident,  and  if,  in  addition,  one  has 
a  divine  "message"  for  the  world,  what 
further  need  be  said  ?  That,  I  take  it,  is  the 
argument  of  Bloy's  conviction.  It  is  a  prob- 
lem which  I  should  like  to  set  before  Tolstoi. 
I  am  not  sure  that  the  meekest  and  the  most 
arrogant  enemy  of  our  civilisation  would  not 
join  hands,  Tolstoi's  with  a  gift  in  it,  of- 
fered freely  and  humbly,  which  Bloy's  would 
take,  freely  and  proudly. 
1902. 


128 


VICTOR  HUGO  AND  WORDS 


VICTOR  HUGO  AND  WORDS 

The  centenary  of  Hugo  gives  this  collec- 
tion a  special  interest  as  the  last  thing  from 
the  hand  of  the  master  whose  astonishing 
literary  career  began  in  1816.  On  one  of 
the  pages  of  the  Post-scriptum  de  ma  Vie 
he  writes:  Mais  les  fondateurs  de  religions 
out  erre,  Vanalogie  n'est  pas  toujour*  la 
logique.  The  whole  of  this  book  is  a  vast 
exercise  in  analogies.  It  comes  to  us  as  with 
the  voice  of  a  new  revelation;  it  neither 
proves  nor  denies,  nor  does  it  even  argue; 
from  beginning  to  end  it  affirms.  And  the 
affirmations  range  over  the  universe.  L'in- 
telligence  est  Vepouse,  V imagination  est  la 
maitresse,  la  memoire  est  la  servante. 
There,  on  the  side  of  a  witty  common  sense, 
is  one  affirmation.  Here,  in  the  language 
of  an  apocalyptic  mysticism,  is  another: 
Et  cfest  toujours  de  Vimmanent,  toujours 
131 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


"F.Saumon  .A./ 
Victor  Hugo  as  a  Young  Man 


132 


VICTOR     HUGO     AND     WORDS 


present,  toajours  tangible,  tou jours  inex- 
plicable, toujours  inconcevable,  toujours  in- 
contestable, que  sort  I 'agenouillement  hu- 
main.  There  are  270  pages  of  the  most 
eloquent  images  in  the  world — images  which 
seem  to  bubble  out  of  the  brain  like  unin- 
habitable worlds  out  of  the  creating  hands 
of  a  mad  deity.  Every  image  detaches  itself 
gaily,  floats  away  with  supreme  confidence 
into  space;  and  perhaps  arrives  somewhere: 
certainly  it  soon  becomes  invisible.  Mon- 
mouth and  Macedon  are  at  one  for  ever  in 
these  astonishing  pages ;  every  desire  of  the 
heart  seems  to  fulfil  itself  by  its  mere  utter- 
ance; there  is  no  longer  a  truism:  ABC 
have  become  miraculous  again,  as  they  were 
in  the  beginning.  Qu'est-ce  que  V ocean ? 
Cest  tine  permission.  When  the  ocean  is  a 
permission,  birds  may  fly  where  they  please. 
And  these  little,  hard,  sharp  sentences  are 
scattered  violently  in  all  directions ;  they  rise 
like  fireworks,  they  fall  like  comets,  lighting 
*33 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

up  patches  of  impenetrable  darkness.  They 
succeed  one  another  so  rapidly  that  the  eyes 
can  scarcely  follow  them;  and  each  leaves 
behind  it  the  same  blackness. 

When  Victor  Hugo  thought  that  he  was 
thinking,  he  was  really  listening  to  the  in- 
articulate murmur  that  words  make  among 
themselves  as  they  await  the  compelling 
hand  of  their  master.  He  was  master  of 
them  all,  and  they  adored  him,  and  they 
served  him  so  willingly  and  so  swiftly  that 
ihe  never  needed  to  pause  and  choose  among 
ithem,  or  think  twice  on  what  errand  he 
should  send  them.  They  had  started  on 
their  errand  before  he  had  finished  the  mes- 
sage he  had  to  give  them. 

Par  le  ciel,  dont  la  mort  est  le  noir  machiniste, 
Le  sage  sur  le  sort  s'accoude,  calme  et  triste, 
I     Content  d'un  peu  de  pain  et  d'une  goutte  d'eau, 
Et,  pensif,  il  attend  le  lever  du  rideau. 

Is  not  this  epigram  rather  than  poetry,  in- 
genuity rather  than  imagination?    Does  it 
134 


VICTOR     HUGO     AND     WORDS 


not  show,  in  the  words  of  M.  de  Regnier, 
a  little  of  le  gigantesque  effort  du  prosateur 
qui  boite  d'une  antithese  fatigantef  Or 
take  this  line, 

La  vie  est  un  torchon  orne  d'une  dentelle, 

which  it  has  seemed  worth  giving  by  itself 
among  the  Tas  de  Pierres,  a  line  certainly 
characteristic  of  Hugo :  can  one  accept  it  as 
a  line  of  poetry,  or  is  it  not  rather,  like  the 
whole  passage  which  we  have  quoted,  an 
effort  of  mere  prose  logic?  Poem  follows 
poem,  sonorous,  ingenious,  exterior,  made 
for  the  most  part  out  of  a  commonplace 
which  puffs  itself  out  to  a  vast  size.  They 
are  like  clusters  of  glittering  images  round 
the  faint  light  of  a  tiny  idea.  One  cannot 
read  them  without  admiration  for  their 
astonishing  cleverness;  still  one  cannot  feel 
anything  but  cold  admiration,  without  either 
interest  or  sympathy.  They  are  the  mathe- 
matical piling  up  of  a  given  structure,  in 
135 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


a  given  way,  always  the  same.  Poem  re- 
peats poem  like  an  echo;  always  the  same 
admirable  form,  finished  to  a  kind  of  hard 
clear  surface,  off  which  the  mind  slips,  with- 
out penetrating  it.  It  is  really  difficult  to 
read  a  poem  like  Soir  d'Avril,  for  instance, 
with  its  facile  forty-five  stanzas,  so  apt,  so 
eloquent,  so  elegant,  so  generalized,  in  which 
so  many  pretty  things  are  said  about  love, 
but  in  which  love  never  speaks  with  its  own 
voice.  All  these  resonant  poems  about  Babel, 
and  hell,  and  le  grand  Eire  contain  splen- 
did images,  and  rise  into  a  fine  oratory;  but 
they  come  to  us  like  the  voice  of  a  crowd, 
not  the  voice  of  a  man. 

Among  the  fragments  in  these  pages  are 
some  epigrams  of  a  Latin  sharpness  and 
savour.     Take  this  one,  A  un  Critique: — 

Un  aveugle  a  le  tact  tres  fin,  tres  net,  tres  clair; 
Autant  que  le  renard  des  bois,  il  a  le  flair ; 
Autant  que  le  chamois  des  monts,  il  a  l'ouie ; 
Sa  sensibilite,  rare,  exquise,  inouie, 
136 


2<*r.') 


Facsimile  of  Letter  from  Victor  Hugo 


VICTOR     HUGO    AND    WORDS 


Du  moindre  vent  coulis  lui  fait  un  coup  de  poing; 

Son  oreille  est  subtile  et  delicate  au  point 

Que  lorsque  un  oiseau  chante,  il  croit  qu'un  taureau 

beugle. 
Quel  flair!  quel  tact!  quel  gout! — Oui,  mais  il  est 

aveugle. 

There,  in  that  merely  logical  development 
of  an  idea,  in  that  strictly  calculated  progres- 
sion, you  will  find  the  method  which  really 
lies  hidden  in  most  of  the  more  eloquent, 
the  more  obviously  poetical,  passages  in  this 
volume.  A  poem  which  impresses  by  its 
largeness  and  loftiness,  Du  Haut  des  Mon- 
tagues, is  poetical,  if  one  looks  into  it,  only 
in  its  choice  of  detail;  the  "mental  cartoon- 
ing" is  inadequate,  mechanical.    It  begins : — 

Voici  les  Apennins,  les  Alpes  et  les  Andes. 
Tais-toi,  passant,  devant  ces  visions  si  grandes. 
Silence,  homme!  histrion!    Les  monts  contemplent 
Dieu. 

Then  comes  a  powerful  and  vivid  statement 
of 

137 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


Le  drame  formidable  ei  sombre  de  l'abime, 
L'entree  et  la  sortie  etrange  de  la  nuit, 

of  which  the  mountains  are  the  spectators; 
then  the  reflection : — 

Pour  eux,  l'homme  n'est  pas,  un  peuple  s'evapore; 

finally,  a  geographical  conclusion : — 

Balkan,  sans  voir  Stamboul,  chante  son  noir  salem ; 
Sina  voit  1'infini,  mais  non  Jerusalem. 

Is  there  not  in  all  this  something  a  little 
obvious,  a  little  made  up  ?  Is  it  not  an  effect 
of  rhetoric  rather  than  an  authentic  vision? 
That  the  authentic  vision  can  be  found  in 
Hugo  when  Hugo  is  his  finest  self,  we  all 
know;  but  in  how  much  of  his  work,  as  in 
the  whole,  or  almost  the  whole,  of  this  last 
volume  of  it,  we  find  that  fundamentally  in- 
sincere rhetoric  which  is  none  the  less  insin- 
cere because  it  is  thundered  from  the  hilltop ! 
The  testament  of  Victor  Hugo,  Post- 
138 


VICTOR     HUGO     AND     WORDS 


scriptum  de  ma  Vie,  is  after  all  not  the  last 
publication  of  a  writer  whose  energy  seems 
to  survive  death.  Here  is  Dernier e  Gerbe, 
the  last  sheaf,  a  collection  of  poems,  of  which 
the  earliest  dates  from  1829.  For  the  most 
part  the  poems  are  complete,  but  there  is  a 
small  collection  of  fragments,  called  Tas  de 
Pierres,  single  lines,  couplets  and  stanzas; 
and  at  the  end  of  the  volume  are  some  dis- 
connected scenes  and  speeches  from  one  or 
two  unfinished  plays,  Une  Aventure  de  Don 
Cesar,  Maglia,  Gavoulagoule. 

The  poems  contained  in  this  volume  are 
all  characteristic  of  Hugo,  but  not  charac- 
teristic of  Hugo  at  his  best.  Take,  for  ex- 
ample, Le  Rideau: — 

Ce  monde,  fete  ou  deuil,  palais  ou  galetas, 
Est  chimerique,  faux,  ondoyant,  plein  d'un  tas 
De  spectres  vains,  qu'on  nomme  Amour,  Orgueil, 

Envie. 
L'immense  ciel  bleu  pend,  tire  sur  l'autre  vie. 
Le  vrai  drame,  ou  deja  nos  coeurs  sont  rattaches, 
Les  personnages,  vrais,  helas!  nous  sont  caches. 

139 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


It  did  not  matter;  there  were  always  more 
words,  and  more  and  more,  ready  to  do  his 
bidding.    Listen : — 

Pourquoi  Virgile  est-il  inferieur  a  Ho- 
mere?  Pourquoi  Anacreon  est-il  inferieur  a 
Pindar e?  Pourquoi  Menandre  est-il  inferieur 
a  Aristophane?  Pourquoi  Sophocle  est-il 
inferieur  a  Eschyle?  Pourquoi  Lysippe  est- 
il  inferieur  a  Phidias?  Pourquoi  David 
est-il  inferieur  a  Isaie? '.  Pourquoi  Thucyd- 
ide  est-il  inferieur  a  Herodotef  Pourquoi 
deer  on  est-il  inferieur  a  Demosthenef 

There  are  eight  more  similar  queries,  and 
there  the  series  ends,  but  there  is  no  reason 
why  it  should  ever  have  ended. 

"The  primitive  and  myth-making  char- 
acter of  his  imagination,"  says  Mr.  Have- 
lock  Ellis,  "the  tendency  to  regard  meta- 
phors as  real,  and  to  accept  them  as  the 
basis  of  his  mental  constructions  and  doc- 
trines, these  tendencies,  which  Hugo  shared 
with  the  savage,  are  dependent  on  rudi- 
140 


VICTOR     HUGO     AND     WORDS 


mentary  emotions  and  a  high  degree  of  ig- 
norance regarding  the  precise  relationship 
of  things." 

Which  he  shared  with  the  savage,  yes, 
with  that  primitive  being  which  is  at  the 
root  of  every  great  poet.  The  poet  who 
is  also  a  philosopher  loses  nothing  as  a 
poet ;  he  adds  meaning  to  beauty.  But  there 
is  also  the  poet  to  whom  the  vast  joy  of 
making  is  sufficient,  who  has  no  curiosity 
concerning  the  work  of  his  hands;  who 
makes  beauty,  and  leaves  it  to  others  to  ex- 
plain it.  "Le  beau,  c'est  la  forme,"  declares 
Hugo.  "La  forme  est  essentielle  et  absolue ; 
elle  vient  des  entrailles  memes  de  l'idee." 
To  work,  with  Hugo,  was  almost  an  auto- 
matic process;  an  enormous  somnambulism 
carried  his  soul  about  the  world  of  imagina- 
tion. Read  the  Promontorium  Somnii  in 
this  testament;  it  is  a  picture  in  fifty  pages, 
and  each  sentence  is  a  separate  picture. 
Ideas?  ideas  come  and  go,  drift  away  and 
141 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


return;  visible  and  audible  ideas  helping  to 
make  the  colours  of  the  picture. 

There  is  beauty  in  this  book,  as  in  every- 
thing that  Hugo  wrote;  there  is  the  great 
poetic  orator's  mastery  of  language.  Hugo's 
poetry  was  never  made  to  be  "overheard"; 
his  prose  knocks  hard  at  the  ear  for  instant 
hearing.  Even  when  he  dreams,  he  dreams 
oratorically ;  he  would  have  you  realise  that 
he  is  asleep  on  Patmos.  He  has  strange 
glimpses.  Le  spectre  blanc  coud  des  manches 
a  son  suaire  et  devient  Pierrot.  Quant  a  la 
quantite  de  comedie  qui  peut  se  meter  au 
reve,  qui  ne  Va  eprouvef    On  rit  endormi. 

Little  passing  thoughts,  each  an  analogy, 
leap  out:  L'echo  est  la  rime  de  la  nature. 
Ce  qui  fait  que  la  musique  plait  tant  au 
commun  des  hommes,  c'est  que  c'est  de  la 
reverie  toute  faite. 

Every  sentence  contains  an  antithesis  or 
forms  an  epigram.  All  is  clamour,  clangour, 
and  the  voice  of  "loud  uplifted  angel- 
142 


VICTOR     HUGO     AND     WORDS 


trumpets."    When  it  is  ended,  and  one  looks 
back,  it  is  as  if  one  tried  to  recall  the  shapes 
and  colours  of  an  avalanche  of  clouds  seen 
by  night  over  a  wide  and  tossing  sea. 
1902. 


143 


A  TRAGIC  COMEDY 


A  TRAGIC  COMEDY 

In  one  of  the  letters  now  published  in 
their  complete  form  for  the  first  time,  Al- 
fred de  Musset  writes : — "La  posterite  repe- 
tera  nos  noms  comme  ceux  de  ces  amants 
immortels  qui  n'en  ont  plus  qu'un  a  eux 
deux,  comme  Romeo  et  Juliette,  comme 
Heloise  et  Abelard.  On  ne  parlera  jamais 
de  Tun  sans  parler  de  rautre."  It  is  true 
that  the  name  of  George  Sand  instinc- 
tively calls  up  the  name  of  Alfred  de  Mus- 
set, and  that  his  name  instinctively  calls 
up  hers.  But  does  posterity  really  repeat 
the  names  of  "the  lovers  of  Venice"  in  the 
same  spirit  as  it  repeats  the  names  of  the 
lovers  of  Verona,  or  even  as  it  repeats  the 
name  of  "the  learned  nun"  and  her  lover? 
A  third  name  asks  to  be  admitted  into  the 
company;  posterity  queries,  "And  Pagello?" 

This  is  a  question  on  which  the  last  word 
147 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


will  probably  never  be  said;  but  the  most 
important  documents  in  the  case,  certainly, 
are  those  which  have  now  been  published  in 
as  entire  a  condition  as  George  Sand's  care- 
ful scissors  left  them.  They  were  pre- 
served by  her,  it  is  clear,  as  a  justification 
of  herself;  and  there  is  no  doubt  that  they 
justified  her  in  her  own  eyes.  It  is  still 
possible  to  read  them  through,  and,  while 
admitting  the  troubles  that  she  had  to  suffer 
from  a  spoilt  child  like  Musset,  to  sympa- 
thise, if  not  actually  to  take  sides,  with 
Musset  rather  than  with  her.  Musset's  let- 
ters, with  all  their  extravagance,  sentimen- 
tality, literary  affectations,  petulances,  fits 
and  starts  of  feeling,  hysteria  even,  are  the 
letters  of  a  man  who  is  really  in  love,  who 
really  suffers  acutely.  George  Sand's  letters 
are  maternal,  affectionate,  reasonable,  sooth- 
ing, at  times  worried  into  a  little  energy 
of  feeling;  but  they  are  the  letters  of  a 
woman  who  has  never  really  loved  the  man 
148 


A     TRAGIC     COMEDY 


whom  she  has  left  for  another.  "Tu  as 
vingt-trois  ans,  et  voila  que  j'en  ai  trente- 
et-un,"  she  says,  in  one  of  the  last  of  them ; 
and  there,  certainly,  is  the  explanation  of 
much.  In  one  of  the  first  letters  after 
Musset's  flight  from  Venice,  he  writes  to 
her:  "Tu  t'etais  trompee;  tu  t'es  crue  ma 
maitresse,  tu  n'etais  que  ma  mere;"  and  she 
answers,  "Peu  importe !"  She  calls  him  "Mon 
petit  f rere,  mon  enfant,"  and  cries,  "Ah !  qui 
te  soignera  et  qui  soignerai-je?  Qui  aura 
besoin  de  moi  et  de  qui  voudrai-je  prendre 
soin  desormais?"  The  real  woman  speaks 
there,  and,  coming  when  it  does  in  the  story, 
it  is  not  the  word  of  a  lover.  It  expresses 
the  need  of  an  organisation,  the  besoin  de 
nonrrir  cette  matemelle  sollicitude  qui  s'est 
habituee  a  veiller  sur  un  etre  souffrant  et 
fatigue.  Between  this  instinct  of  compas- 
sion and  the  impulse  of  love  there  is  a  great 
gulf.  It  is  an  instinct  that  may  be  heroism 
in  a  woman  who  renounces  love  for  its  sake. 
149 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

But  a  very  harsh  kind  of  comedy  steps  in 
when  the  woman  writes  of  her  present  lover 
to  her  former  lover :  "Je  Taimais  comme  un 
pere,  et  tu  etais  notre  enfant  a  tous  deux." 

It  is  true  that  Musset,  genuine  as  his  let- 
ters seem  to  be  in  their  expression  of  a  real 
feeling,  is  not  always  absorbed  in  it  to  the 
exclusion  of  other  interests.  A  month  after 
he  has  left  Venice,  in  the  midst  of  a  troubled 
and  very  serious  letter,  he  says  suddenly: — 

Je  m'en  vats  faire  un  roman.  J'ai  bien  envie 
d'ecrire  notre  histoire:  il  me  semble  que  cela  me 
guerirait  et  m'eleverait  le  ccewr. 

He  asks  her  permission  which  she  gives 
readily;  she  is  writing  something  else,  not 
about  herself  or  him  at  all,  a  part  of  her 
undeviating  course  of  work,  which  flows 
onward,  then  and  always,  without  change 
of  direction,  or  in  any  direction.  While  he 
reads  Werther  and  meditates  the  Confession 
d'un  Enfant  du  Siecle,  a  book  certainly 
150 


A     TRAGIC     COMEDY 


made  out  of  the  best  of  his  heart  and  the 
most  honest  part  of  his  senses,  she  is  ask- 
ing him  to  correct  her  proofs  for  the  Revue 
des  Deux  Mondes,  and  to  insert  the  chapter- 
divisions,  which  she  is  afraid  in  her  haste 
she  has  forgotten.  Later  in  the  book  the 
letters  become  more  exciting.  They  meet 
again,  and  Musset  forgets  everything  but 
his  love.  The  letter  from  Baden  is  an  out- 
cry almost  of  agony.  The  words  gasp  and 
rush:  Je  suis  perdu,  vois-tu,  je  suis  noye, 
inonde  d'amour;  je  ne  sais  plus  si  je  vis,  si 
je  mange,  si  je  marche,  si  je  respire,  si  je 
park;  je  sais  que  j'aime.  Je  t'aime,  ma 
chair.  Pagello  is  no  longer  between  them, 
but  there  is  something,  as  before,  between 
them;  she  tries  to  love  him  again,  seems 
about  to  succeed,  and  then  there  is  the  new, 
inevitable  parting  with  which  these  letters 
end.  In  some  of  the  brief  last  letters  she, 
too,  seems  to  suffer,  and  the  distressing  rea- 
sonableness of  tone  gives  way  to  a  less 
I5i 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


guarded  emphasis.  But  she  recovers  her- 
self, and  with  the  cry  of,  Mes  enfans,  mes 
en  fans!  leaves  him. 

Such  value  as  the  episode  may  have  had 
to  the  rarer  genius  of  the  two  is  to  be  found, 
perhaps,  in  the  phrase  of  Musset,  true  most 
likely:  Sois  fiere,  mon  grand  et  brave 
George,  tu  as  fait  un  homme  d'un  enfant. 
The  amount  of  "self-improvement"  derived 
by  George  Sand  from  the  same  experience 
is  a  more  negligible  quantity.  Musset  at 
least  was  to  write  a  few  songs  and  a  few 
comedies  which  were  worth  any  "expense 
of  spirit"  whatever;  and  if  George  Sand 
helped  to  make  him  the  man  who  was  ca- 
pable of  writing  these,  she  did  well.  Her 
own  sentimental  education  could  probably 
have  done  without  Musset  easily  enough; 
we  might  have  had  one  Elle  et  Lui  the  less, 
but  we  should  have  had  one  Lucrezia 
Floriani  the  more.  Musset  or  Pagello, 
Chopin  or  Pierre  Leroux,  it  mattered  little 

152 


A     TRAGIC     COMEDY 


to  her;  each  added  an  appreciable  interest 
to  her  life,  and  an  appreciable  volume  or  so 
to  her  work.  But  of  no  man  could  it  be 
said  that  he  had  been  needful  to  her,  that 
he  had  helped  to  make  her  what  she  was. 
She  went  through  life  taking  what  she 
wanted,  and  she  ended  her  days  in  calm 
self-content,  the  most  famous  of  contempo- 
rary women.  It  is  possible  that  in  the 
future  she  will  be  remembered  chiefly  as  the 
friend  or  enemy  of  some  of  the  greatest  men 
of  her  time. 
1904. 


153 


PETRUS  BOREL 


PETRUS  BOREL 

The  name  of  Petrus  Borel  has  come  to 
be  a  laughing-stock  to  the  Philistine,  a  by- 
word to  the  Bourgeois.  His  nick-name,  "le 
lycanthrope,"  is  remembered,  but  it  is  for- 
gotten that  it  was  of  his  own  christening. 
What  Gautier  said  of  him  as  a  friend,  and 
Baudelaire  as  a  critic;  all  that  and  the  fact 
that  he  was  the  chief  of  a  cenacle  and  "un 
roi  qui  s'en  allait,"  all  but  a  few  seekers 
after  lost  reputations  have  forgotten.  He 
is  a  figure  fantastic  but  not  grotesque,  a 
defier  of  order  but  a  slave  of  letters.  He 
dreamed  of  conquering  the  world.  He  was 
a  dandy,  whether  with  a  "gilet  a  la  Robes- 
pierre" or  naked  under  a  tiger-skin.  His 
whole  work,  scattered  in  reviews  and  jour- 
nals, and  never  reprinted,  is  contained  in 
a  novel,  a  book  of  short  stories,  and  a  book 
of  verse.  None  of  them  are  accessible,  and 
157 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


one,  not  the  least  remarkable,  exists  only  in 
its  original  edition  of  1833,  of  which  I  have 
a  copy.  No  one  has  ever  yet  done  them 
entire  justice. 

Pierre-Joseph  Borel  de  Hauterive  was 
born  in  Lyons  26  June,  1809,  and  died  at 
Mostaganem,  in  Algeria,  on  14  July,  1859. 
The  events  of  his  life  are  of  no  great  im- 
portance, but  his  ill-luck  was  continuous. 
He  was  set  to  be  an  architect,  and  built  a 
few  houses  and  the  once  famous  Cirque  of 
the  Boulevard  du  Temple.  But  he  preferred 
the  studios  of  his  friends,  and  was  soon  pen- 
niless. His  books  brought  him  no  money, 
he  founded  newspapers  with  names  such 
as  Le  Satan,  Vane  d'or,  and  wrote  articles, 
stories  and  poems  wherever  he  could  get 
them  taken;  finally,  in  1846,  through  the 
help  of  Gautier  and  Mme.  de  Giradin, 
was  appointed  Inspector  of  Colonies  at 
Mostaganem.  There  he  built  a  house  for 
himself  which  he  called  "Haute  Pensee." 

158 


p£trus   borel 


In  1848  he  was  turned  out  of  his  post,  and 
afterwards  removed  to  another.  He  mar- 
ried, and  had  a  son,  Alderan-Andre-Petrus- 
Benoni;  and  died  in  misery  in  the  year 
1859. 

The  jeune  et  fatal  poete  has  described 
himself  under  an  imaginary  name  in  the 
preface  of  one  of  his  books:  its  exactitude 
is  confirmed  by  all  the  portraits  painted  and 
the  eulogies  written  by  his  friends.  The 
two  mottoes  on  the  title-page  of  Rapsodies 
render  its  character  with  great  exactness. 
One  is  chosen  from  Regnier,  one  from 
Malherbe.  The  former  affirms  the  author 
to  be, 

"Hautain,  audacieux,  conseiller  de  lui-meme, 
Et  d'un  coeur  obstine  se  heurte  a  ce  qu'il  aime." 

The  second,  in  the  name  of  the  book,  de- 
clares : 

"Vous,  dont  les  censures  s'etendent 
Dessus  les  ouvrages  de  tous, 
Ce  livre  se  moque  de  vous." 

1 59 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

Nothing  more  remained  to  be  said,  only- 
there  is  a  long  preface:  the  end  is  fine 
irony:  "Heuresement  que  pour  se  consoler 
•  de  tout  cela,  il  nous  reste  l'adultere !  le  tabac 
de  Maryland!  et  du  papel  espagnol  pour 
cigaritos."  He  names  himself  "Un  loup- 
cervier."  "Mon  republicanisme,  c'est  de  la 
lycanthropie!"  The  word  caught,  he  recap- 
tured it,  and  "le  lycanthrope"  will  be  found 
among  his  titles  for  himself.  The  book  be- 
gins and  ends  with  an  avowal  of  poverty, 
and  between  that  beginning  and  ending 
what  romantic  dreams, — what  towers,  chate- 
laines, what  satisfaction  to  have  only  "a 
tattered  cloak,  a  poignard,  and  the  skies,"  if 
one  can  also  "taste  one's  sorrows  in  an  ele- 
gant tea-cup."  The  sombre  Carlovingian 
manner  is  there.  Is  it  from  Hugo  already 
that  the  romantic  properties  find  their  way 
into  these  pages,  and  this  sort  of  antithesis : 

"Enfer!  si  ta  peine  est  ma  peine, 
Qu'en  ce  moment  tu  dois  souffrir!" 
160 


PETRUS     BOREL 


It  was  in  the  air,  and  all  the  gay  and  fierce 
love-songs  were  what  everybody  was  writ- 
ing. What  is  personal  comes  in,  here  for 
instance,  where  the  vagabond  life  of  Petrus 
and  his  companions  is  indicated  in  a  single 
quaint  stanza: 

"Chats  de  coulisse,  endeves! 
Devant  la  salle  ebahie 
Traversant,  rideaux  leves, 
Le  Theatre  de  la  vie." 

And  there  is  the  ceaseless  refrain  which  re- 
turns throughout  his  whole  work : 

"Naitre,  souffrir,  mourir,  c'est  tout  dans  la  nature 
Ce  que  rhomme  pergoit;  car  elle  est  un  bouquin 
Qu'on  ne  peut  dechiffrer:  un  manuscrit  arabe 
Aux  mains  d'un  muletier :  hors  le  titre  et  le  fin 
II  n'interprete  rien,  rien,  pas  une  syllable." 

The  wolf  barks  harshly  enough,  and  to  little 
purpose,  in  the  political  pieces,  but  has  not 
yet  tasted  blood.  Champavert  is  hardly 
anticipated  in  Agarite,  the  one  dainty  frag- 
ment of  dialogue,  with  its  instant  of  drama. 
161 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


All  this,  however,  is  in  the  interval,  and  we 
end  with  a  desperate  epilogue:  "J'ai  faim." 
It  is  curious  how  many  things  which 
Petrus  Borel  could  not  achieve  he  left  as  an 
impetus  to  others.  Few  readers  probably 
have  paid  any  heed  to  the  motto,  of  the  fifth 
Ariette  oubliee  of  the  Romances  sans 
Paroles: 

"Son  joyeux,  importun  d'un  clavecin  sonore." 

Verlaine's  poem  is  a  miraculous  transposi- 
tion of  what  Borel  only  suggests  in  his  poem, 
which  is  called  Doleance  and  is  a  personal 
lament.  But  he  has  taken  from  it  all  that 
he  needs;  there  is,  besides  the  line  quoted, 
the  "Parle,  que  me  veux-tu?"  which  may  be 
discerned  in  "Que  voudrais-tu  de  moi?" 
May  not  "une  main  frele"  come  from: 

"Indiscret,  d'ou  viens  tu?     Sans  doute  une  main 
blanche, 
Un  beau  doigt  prisonnier 
Dans  de  riches  joyaux  a  frappe  sur  ton  anche 
D'ivoire  et  d'ebenier?" 
162 


Medallion  of  Petrus  Borel 


PETRUS     BOREL 


Of  a  bitter,  personal  lament,  in  which  the 
"clavecin  sonore"  is  a  mere  starting-point, 
Verlaine  has  made  a  floating,  vague,  and 
divine  dream  of  music  scarcely  heard  in  a 
twilight:  no  more  than  that,  but  a  master- 
piece. But  to  him,  as  to  others,  it  was 
Petrus  who  had  given  the  first  impulse. 

Petrus  Borel's  best  poem  is  not  to  be  found 
in  the  Rapsodies,  but  in  the  form  of  a  pro- 
logue to  Madame  Putiphar.  It  is  filled 
with  a  grave  and  remote  phantasy,  and  in 
its  cold  ardour,  its  romantic  equipment,  and 
its  naked  self  under  that  cloak,  it  anticipates 
Baudelaire,  and  is  almost  worthy  of  him. 
Baudelaire  was  conscious  of  its  merit,  and 
has  defined  it  as,  "un  etrange  poeme,  d'une 
sonorite  si  eclatante  et  d'une  couleur 
presque  primitive  a  force  d'intensite."  The 
poem  is  a  cavalcade  of  three  adversaries  in 
the  soul :  the  world,  a  mystic's  solitude,  and 
death.  The  picture  of  each  is  given:  the 
first,  young,  gay  in  his  steel  corslet  on  his 
163 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


caparisoned  horse;  the  second  bestrides  a 
bony  mule ;  the  third,  a  hideous  gnome,  bears 
at  his  side  a  great  fishhook,  on  which  hangs 
nets  of  unclean  creatures.  And  so,  he  ends, 
after  praising  and  cursing  each  in  turn,  with 
admiration  and  hate, 

"Ainsi,  depuis  long-temps,  s'entrechoque  et  se  taille 

Cet  infernal  trio, — ces  trois  fiers  spadassins: 

lis  ont   pris,   les  mediants,   pour  leur  champ   de 

bataille, 
Mon  pauvre  coeur,  meurtri  sous  leurs  coups  as- 
sassins, 
Mon  pauvre  coeur  navre,  qui  s'affaisse  et  se  broie, 
Douteur,  religieux,  fou,  mondain,  mecreant! 
Quand  finira  la  lutte,  et  qui  m'aura  pour  proie, — 
Dieu  le  sait ! — du  Desert,  du  Monde  ou  du  Neant  ?" 

In  the  year  1833  a  book  of  between  four 
and  five  hundred  pages  was  published  in 
Paris  by  the  firm  of  Eugene  Renduel,  under 
the  title:  Champavert.  Contes  Immoraux, 
par  Petrus  Borel,  le  Lycanthrope.  The  first 
thirty-eight  pages  contain  a  Notice  sur 
164 


PETRUS     BOREL 


Champavert,  written  by  the  author,  and 
professing  that  Petrus  Borel  was  dead,  and 
that  his  real  name  had  been  Champavert. 
Some  of  the  poems  published  two  years  be- 
fore in  the  Rapsodies  are  quoted,  and  some 
biographical  notes,  not  perhaps  imaginary, 
are  given.  The  rest  of  the  book  contains 
seven  stories,  named:  Monsieur  de  V Ar- 
gentine, I'Accusateur,  Jaquez  Banaon,  le 
Charpentier  (La  Havane),  Don  Andrea 
Vesalius,  V Anatomist e  (Madrid),  Three 
Fingered  Jack,  VObi  (La  Jamaique),  Dina, 
la  Belle  Juive  (Lyon),  Passer eau,  I'Ecolier 
(Paris),  and  Champavert,  le  Ly cant hr ope 
(Paris). 

Each  has  a  motto,  or  a  series  of  mottoes, 
on  the  fly  leaf  of  its  title,  mostly  from  the 
Bible,  and  from  contemporary  poets,  Gerard, 
Gautier,  Musset.  Each  story  is  divided 
into  a  great  number  of  divisions,  and  every 
division  has  its  own  title,  more  often  in 
English,  Spanish,  Latin,  or  Provencal  than 

165 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


in  French.  These  seven  stories,  though  not 
immoral,  as  they  profess  to  be,  in  the  defiant 
manner  of  the  day,  are  as  extraordinary 
as  any  production  of  the  human  brain.  All 
are  studies  in  horrors  and  iniquities;  above 
all,  in  the  shedding  of  blood.  Written  by 
anyone  else  they  would  be  revolting,  for  they 
spare  no  detail  of  monstrous  deeds;  they 
would  be  pitiless  but  for  their  immense  self- 
pity;  cruel  but  for  their  irony,  which  is  a 
bitter,  personal,  and  at  times  magnificent 
arraignment  of  things.  They  are  crude,  ex- 
travagant, built  up  out  of  crumbling  and 
far-sought  materials;  they  are  deliberately 
improbable,  and  the  persons  who  sin  and 
suffer  in  them  are  males  all  brain  and 
females  all  idols  and  ideals.  They  are  as  far 
from  reality  as  intention  and  style  can  make 
them;  a  world  of  vari-coloured  puppets 
swinging  on  unregulated  wires.  And  yet 
these  violences  and  crudities  and  all  this  dig- 
ging in  graveyards  and  fumbling  in  the  dead 
166 


PETRUS     BOREL 


souls  of  the  treacherous  and  the  unforgiving, 
have  something  in  them  or  under  them,  a 
sincerity,  a  real  hatred  of  evil  and  unholy- 
things,  which  keeps  us  from  turning  away, 
as  our  first  impulse  may  well  be,  in  mere 
disgust.  A  man,  suffering  from  some  deadly 
misery,  leaps  before  us  in  ironical  gym- 
nastics, and  comes  down  with  his  mortal 
laugh,  a  clown,  in  the  arena.  That  is  what 
makes  the  book  tragic,  a  buffoon's  criticism 
of  life;  there  is  philosophy  in  it,  and  an 
angry  pathos. 

Can  the  sense  of  horror  become,  to  those 
accustoming  themselves  to  it,  a  kind  of 
luxury,  like  drunkenness?  In  another  later 
book  Borel  tells  us  that  it  can:  "Car  il  y  a 
dans  la  douleur  une  volupte  mysterieuse  dont 
le  malheureux  est  avide;  car  la  souffrance 
est  savoureuse  comme  le  bonheur."  Many 
great  writers  have  had  it,  as  a  small  part 
of  their  genius;  Hugo  had  it,  for  instance, 
together  with  his  passion  for  the  tragically 
167 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

grotesque.  But  in  this  one  writer  horror 
seems  to  be  almost  the  whole  substance  of 
his  dreams.  Whenever  he  seems  about  to 
open  the  door  to  beauty,  horror  shuts  to 
the  door.  He  does  not  suggest,  he  is 
minute,  and  will  number  every  circumstance, 
which  others  would  turn  from.  At  times 
horror  finds  a  voice  in  such  a  litany  as  Dina 
and  the  boatman  chant  on  their  dreadful 
voyage;  or,  with  an  appalling  irony,  in  that 
scene  where  two  negroes,  fighting  to  death, 
stop  suddenly  at  the  sound  of  the  convent 
bell  striking  eight,  draw  apart,  kneel,  re- 
peat the  "Angelus"  each  taking  his  turn, 
pray  silently  for  one  another's  souls,  and 
then  rise  and  hack  and  tear  each  other  to 
pieces.  We  shudder  and  wonder,  and  find 
the  horror  almost  insupportable;  but  we  do 
not,  as  in  a  story  of  Pierre  Louys,  sicken 
at  the  calm,  deliberate  cruelty  of  the  writer. 
In  Petrus  Borel  horror  is  an  obsession:  its 
danger  is  at  times  to  become  an  absurdity. 
1 68 


PETRUS     BOREL 


It  is  one  of  the  defects  of  his  hasty,  de- 
fiant art,  that  we  are  not  always  sure 
whether,  when  he  is  absurd,  he  is  absurd 
intentionally.  And  it  pleased  him  to  write 
a  style  which  was  half  splendour  and  half 
rage.  Listen  to  this  jewellery  of  the  senses 
before  Huysmans:  "Depraved  by  grief,  she 
sought  ardently  for  all  that  irritated  her 
nerves,  all  that  excited  and  awakened  her 
apathy;  she  covered  herself  with  the  most 
heavily  scented  flowers ;  she  surrounded  her- 
self with  vases  full  of  syringa,  jasmine, 
vervain,  roses,  lilies,  tuberoses;  she  burned 
incense  and  benzoin;  she  shook  around  her 
amber,  cinnamon,  storax,  musk."  And  he 
will  tell  you  that  a  woman  is  "pyramidally 
virtuous";  and  I  hardly  know  how  often 
things  are  obombre,  which  is  the  Biblical 
"overshadowed."  English  and  •  Spanish 
rudely  decorated  his  pages,  generally  more 
accurate  than  in  the  seekers  after  this  form 
of  local  colour  in  his  time.  He  has  many 
169 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


varieties  of  dialogue  from  the  pompous  to 
the  abject,  but  all  are  done  with  an  uneven 
energy. 

To  be  delivered  from  most  of  the  beauti- 
ful as  well  as  the  discomforting  things  of 
the  world,  was  the  continual  prayer  of  one 
who  liked  to  be  called  "un  lycanthrope." 
"La  souffrance,"  he  said,  "a  fait  de  moi  un 
loup  feroce,"  and  the  world  to  him  was  a 
thing  "sur  lequel  je  crache,  que  je  meprise, 
que  je  repousse  du  pied."  He  realised  that 
to  think  too  closely  about  life  was  to  be 
unhappy.  And  so  that  varying  image  of 
himself  who  goes  through  the  best  of  his 
stories  is  the  man  who  thinks  and  dies. 
What  logic  there  is  often  in  certain  of  the 
preposterous  scenes,  which  reach  their  sum- 
mit in  the  dialogue  between  the  man  who 
wants  to  be  guillotined  ("not  publicly,  but 
in  your  back-garden")  and  M.  Sanson,  the 
state  mechanician  of  the  guillotine.  The 
bourgeoisie  itself  is  concentrated  in  one  vast 
170 


PETRUS     BOREL 


bewilderment  in  the  professional  gentle- 
man who  doubts,  with  strict  politeness,  the 
sanity  of  a  strange  visitor  who  addresses 
him  after  this  manner:  "Je  jure  par  toutes 
vos  oesophagotomies  que  j'ai  mes  saines  et 
entieres  faculties;  seulement,  le  service  que 
je  vous  prie  de  me  rendre  n'est  point  dans 
les  moeurs."  But  the  one  splendid,  franti- 
cally original,  sentence,  which  gives  the 
whole  accent  to  this  strange  story,  is:  "Peu 
de  chose,  je  voudrais  simplement  que  vous 
me  guillotinassiez." 

The  whole  story  of  Passereau,  in  which 
this  is  the  most  significant  of  several  auda- 
cious and  unparalleled  incidents,  has  a 
macabre  humour  which  is  terrible,  if  you 
will,  but  personal,  and  at  that  time  new.  It 
has  been  seen  since,  and  we  find  Baudelaire, 
consciously  or  not,  taking  the  exact  details 
of  his  murderous  drunkard's  action,  in  Le 
Vin  de  L' Assassin,  from  the  well  in  which 
Passereau  drowns  his  mistress.  The  very 
171 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


words  are  almost  the  same.  "Passereau 
alors,"  we  read,  "avec  un  grand  effort,  de- 
tache  et  fit  tomber  sur  elle,  une  a  une,  les 
pierres  brisees  de  la  margelle,"  just  as  the 
drunkard  in  Baudelaire  was  to  confess 
afterwards : 

"Je  l'ai  jetee  au  fond  d'un  puits, 
Et  j'ai  meme  pousse  sur  elle 
Tous  les  paves  de  la  margelle." 

Huysmans  is  anticipated,  not  only  in  such 
a  passage  as  I  have  quoted,  but  in  that  sketch 
of  an  earlier  des  Esseintes :  "Sometimes,  the 
bad  weather,  having  gone  on  without  inter- 
mission, he  remained  cloistered  for  a  whole 
month,  surrounded  perpetually  by  lamps, 
by  torches,  flooded  by  a  splendid  artificial 
daylight;  reading,  writing  sometimes,  but 
more  often  drunk  or  asleep.  His  door  was 
closed  against  everyone  but  Albert,  who 
came  very  readily,  to  shut  himself  up  with 
him;  not  crazed  by  the  same  delirium,  the 
172 


PETRUS     BOREL 


same  suffering,  the  same  desolation,  but  for 
the  oddity  of  the  thing,  for  the  chance  of 
taking  life  in  a  wrong  sense  and  of  parody- 
ing this  rectilineal  bourgeoisie/'  Is  it  not 
almost  to  the  very  word  characterising  it, 
the  plan  of  existence  in  A  Reboursf 

If  a  wild  but  living  sketch  may  be  com- 
pared, at  whatever  distance,  with  a  flawless 
picture,  it  might  be  said  that  there  is  some- 
thing in  the  power  of  creating  a  sense  of 
suspense  at  the  opening  of  a  story,  and  in 
developing  it  to  the  explicit  horror  of  the 
end,  in  which  Petrus  Borel  sometimes  re- 
minds us  of  Poe.  Still  more  does  he  at 
times  seem  to  anticipate  Villiers  de  L'lsle- 
Adam.  How  like  a  first  sketch  of  Villiers 
is  the  idea  of  suicide  by  guillotine,  and  the 
mock-pedantic  form  of  the  letter  to  the 
"Commission  des  Petitions":  "Dans  un 
moment  ou  la  nation  est  dans  la  penurie  et 
le  tresor  phtisique  au  troisieme  degre,  dans 
un  moment  ou  les  delicieux  contribuables 

173 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


ont  vendu  jusqu'a  leurs  bretelles  pour  solver 
les  taxes,  sur-taxes,  contre-taxes,  re-taxes, 
super-taxes,  archi-taxes,  impots  et  contre- 
impots,  tailler  et  retailler,  capitations,  archi- 
capitations  et  avanies;  dans  un  moment  ou 
votre  monarchic  oberee  et  votre  souveraine 
piriforme  branlent  dans  le  manche,  il  est  du 
devoir  de  tout  bon  citoyen,"  and  so  forth. 

"To  sing  of  love!"  he  says  in  the  Testa- 
ments. It  is  a  catalogue  of  his  work;  not 
Beddoes  was  more  funereal.  Is  this  obses- 
sion of  blood,  this  continual  consciousness 
of  evil,  this  inability  to  see  any  but  the  dark 
contraries  of  things,  a  mere  boastful  affec- 
tation or  the  only  possible  way  of  expressing 
a  personality  so  full  of  discontent,  and  bitter 
knowledge  of  reasoned  complaint?  All  his 
stories  have  such  a  dissection,  such  a  passing 
of  all  things  through  so  bitter  a  crucible. 
"Pauvre  Job  au  fumier,"  he  calls  himself  in 
a  poem,  which  seems  to  be  sincere. 

Petrus  Borel's  next  and  last  complete 
174 


PETRUS     BOREL 


work,  his  "triste  epopee,"  as  he  called  it, 
was  not  published  till  six  years  after 
Champavert.  The  mood  has  again  changed, 
or  rather  changes  in  the  course  of  the  in- 
terminable pages;  the  style  is  elaborated, 
and  used  with  a  singular,  paradoxical  effort. 
The  name,  Madame  Putiphar,  is  of  a  nature 
to  call  up  anticipations  which  are  far 
from  being  gratified.  Never  was  virtue  so 
magnanimously  or  more  preposterously 
presented,  praised,  and  carried  unshaken 
through  unheard  of  tribulations.  Beings  so 
transcendently  moral  and  so  consistently  led 
by  their  merits  and  good  deeds  into  pitfalls 
which  the  smallest  worldly  common-sense 
would  have  avoided,  do  not  exist  in  fiction. 
A  sentence  in  the  book,  not  meant  to  refer 
to  them,  defines  with  perfect  accuracy  the 
manner  of  their  treatment.  "There  are  cer- 
tain cases,"  we  are  told,  "where  really 
reason  has  so  stupid  an  air,  where  logic  has 
so  absurd  a  figure,  that  one  has  to  be  ex- 
175 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


tremely  serious  if  one  does  not  laugh  in 
their  faces."  Is  Deborah  or  Patrick  Mac- 
Why  te  the  more  saintly,  the  more  heroic? 
It  would  be  difficult  to  say,  especially,  as,  by 
a  further  freak  of  their  chronicler,  they  are 
set  for  the  most  part  to  speak  in  a  language 
so  formal  and  artificial  that  the  feeling  it 
is  meant  to  convey  is  only  to  be  faintly  seen 
through  it.  Here  is  Deborah  speaking,  at  a 
moment  of  crisis,  to  her  husband.  "Veuillez 
crolre  que  je  sais  vous  estimer,"  she  says; 
"je  ne  suis  point  assez  impertinente  pour 
me  supposer  Tauteur  de  votre  delicatesse  et 
presumer  que  sans  vos  rapports  avec  mo? 
vous  eussiez  ete  un  malhonnete  homme; 
mais,  sans  fatuite,  il  m'etoit  bien  permis  de 
penser  que,  livre  a.  vous-meme,  sans  liens, 
sans  serments,  sans  dilection  emplissant 
votre  coeur,  place  dans  la  fatale  alternative 
ou  vous  vous  etes  trouve,  vous  auriez  pu 
preferer  manquer  a  Texigence  de  vos  ver- 
tueux  principes,"  and  much  more:  but  no, 
176 


PETRUS     BOREL 


the  faultless  man  would  have  been  quite 
capable  of  doing  it  all,  on  his  own  account. 
It  is  from  the  very  explicit  and  perilous  trial 
of  his  virtue  by  a  Madame  Putiphar  who  is 
meant  to  typify  the  worst  side  of  the  Pompa- 
dour that  the  book  takes  its  name.  Here, 
as  elsewhere,  the  snares  of  evil  are  but 
vaunted  to  be  trampled  upon,  and  the  picture 
which  is  called  up:  "flowers,  candles,  per- 
fumes, sofas,  vases,  ribbons,  damask,  a 
lovely  voice,  a  mandoline,  mirrors,  jewels, 
diamonds,  necklaces,  rings,  earrings,  a  lovely 
and  gracious  woman  lying  back  languor- 
ously," are  but  the  prologue  to  a  condemna- 
tion. 

The  story  itself  begins  with  an  arraign- 
ment of  Providence,  as  if  to  justify  the  ways 
of  man  to  God.  "If  there  is  a  Providence, 
it  often  acts  in  strange  ways!  woe  to  him 
predestined  to  follow  a  strange  way !"  Such 
are  these  martyrs  of  their  own  virtue,  and 
they  are  shown  as,  in  a  way,  God's  puppets. 
177 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


There  is  a  sentence  which  might  have  been 
written  by  Thomas  Hardy,  so  clearly  does  it 
state,  in  an  image  like  one  of  his  own,  the 
very  centre  of  his  philosophy.  "I  have  often 
heard  that  certain  insects  were  made  for 
the  amusement  of  children;  perhaps  man 
also  was  created  for  the  same  pleasures  of 
superior  beings,  who  delight  in  torturing 
him,  and  disport  themselves  in  his  groans." 
There  he  states  his  own  problem:  the  book 
is  to  be  an  illustration  of  it;  hence  the  hor- 
rors and  the  angelic  natures  that  endure 
them.  But  he  has  no  explanation  to  give, 
and  can  but  bow  down,  like  a  later  mouth- 
piece of  Villiers,  "before  the  darkness." 

It  is  from  this  gloomy  and  hopeless  point 
of  view  that  the  whole  horrors  of  the  story 
are  presented,  up  to  page  250  of  the  second 
volume.  Then,  suddenly,  comes  a  change 
of  direction,  and  the  last  sixty  out  of  the 
six  hundred  pages  are  written  from  this 
new  point  of  view.  "When  I  took  up  my 
178 


PETRUS     BOREL 


pen  to  write  this  book  my  mind  was  full 
of  doubts,  of  negations,  of  errors.  But  I 
know  not  by  what  mysterious  means  light 
has  come  to  me  on  the  way.  I  have  con- 
strained myself  in  the  whole  of  this  book 
to  make  vice  flourish  and  dissoluteness  over- 
come virtue ;  I  have  crowned  roses  with  rot- 
tenness; I  have  perfumed  iniquity  with 
nard;  I  have  poured  overflowing  happiness 
into  the  lap  of  infamy;  I  have  brought  the 
firmament  down  to  the  gutter;  I  have  put 
dirt  in  the  sky;  no*  one  of  my  brave  heroes 
has  not  been  a  victim;  everywhere  I  have 
shown  evil  as  the  oppressor  and  good  as  the 
oppressed."  And  now,  he  affirms,  all  these 
cruel  accumulated  destinies  have  turned 
upon  him,  after  all  his  pains  to  interpret 
them,  and  have  given  him  the  lie. 

"There  is  a  Providence,"  he  cries  now, 
a  God  of  Vengeance.    The  just  man,  if  he 
suffers,  suffers  from  some  ancestral  or  at- 
tributed sin;  and  evil  is  destroyed  by  the 
179 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

action  of  God  or  some  destroying  power  in 
man.  "Croyez  a  un  Dieu  punisseur  ici  bas !" 
he  cries,  or  the  world  will  be  an  enigma 
without  a  secret,  an  absurd,  impossible 
charade.  And  he  brings  the  great  symbol 
of  useful  destruction,  the  French  Revolu- 
tion, to  end  his  arraignment  of  the  cruelty 
of  things  by  a  vengeance  in  which  man 
takes  back  his  rights,  the  sheep  shearing  the 
shearer,  the  people  crushing  its  giants  like  a 
rag  between  its  fists.  And  for  him  it  is 
the  approach  of  the  hour  when  all  those 
miseries  that  he  has  sung,  and  mountains 
more  of  them,  shall  weigh  down  the  ultimate 
scale  of  the  balances  of  the  wrath  of  God. 
In  this  sudden  illumination,  this  prophetic 
outburst,  which  ends  a  book  full  of  clouds, 
dissonances,  errors,  absurdities,  but  always 
sincere,  noble  or  tending  blindly  towards 
nobility,  we  see  certain  brave  and  serious 
convictions  underlying  all  that  is  contra- 
dictory and  uncertain  in  a  creature  of  pas- 
180 


p£trus   borel 


sionate  and  eccentric  imagination.  When  a 
people,  he  says,  revolts  against  its  deities, 
its  first  act  is  to  break  their  images.  That 
is  what  he  does  in  these  pages,  where  none 
of  his  deities  are  allowed  to  be  logical. 

A  book  so  incoherent  defies  analysis,  but 
it  is  not  difficult  to  see  how  closely  the  truth 
is  followed  in  many  of  the  details,  the  Defoe- 
like dungeon  scenes,  in  particular,  which 
are  full  of  a  painful  reality,  passing  at  least 
once,  in  the  death-scene  of  Fitz-Harris, 
into  notes  as  of  an  instrumental  solo,  as  he 
cries  in  the  last  ecstasy  of  death  in  the  pit's 
darkness,  "All  shines  like  a  carbuncle;  all 
is  flaming,  caressing,  wavering,  dusty." 

For  the  actual  part  of  these  scenes  Petrus 
Borel  has  an  invaluable  model  in  the  nar- 
rative of  de  Latude.  No  one,  so  far  as  I 
know,  has  identified  the  very  striking  re- 
semblance between  scenes  in  which,  equally, 
we  grope  from  horror  to  horror.  My  copy 
of  Le  Depotism  Devoile,  ou  memoires  de 
181 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


Henri  Masers  De  Latude,  detenu  pendant 
trente-cinq  ans  dans  divers  prisons  d'Etat, 
is  dated  1790,  "imprime  aux  frais  de  M.  de 
Latude,"  and  authenticated  by  his  signature, 
in  his  own  handwriting,  at  the  foot  of  the 
preliminary  Avertissement.  All  the  names 
of  the  governors  of  the  prison,  and  of 
fellow-prisoners  are  taken  by  Borel  from  de 
Latude,  in  one  instance  almost  word  for 
word :  and  the  characterisation  of  Guyonnet, 
the  first  Governor  of  the  Donjon  of  Vin- 
cennes  ("l'honnete  M.  de  Guyonnet,"  as 
Borel  calls  him ;  "homme  delicat  et  honnete," 
as  he  is  called  by  de  Latude),  of  Rouge- 
mont,  his  successor,  who,  in  both  narratives, 
is  represented  as  the  same  odious  tyrant, 
tampering  with  the  prisoners'  food,  brick- 
ing up  the  little  light  left  in  their  windows, 
suppressing  their  walks  in  the  open  air, 
"un  sot,  un  fat,  un  puant,  un  pince-maille, 
un  belitre,"  as  Borel  calls  him,  is  in  both 
identical.  The  terrible  lieutenant-general  of 
182 


PETRUS     BOREL 


police,  defined  by  Borel  as  "un  mauvais 
charlatan  en  maniere  de  magistrate,"  is  seen 
at  much  greater  length  in  de  Latude,  who 
prints  perhaps  the  most  ghastly  letter  in  the 
world.  "II  feroit  a-propos,"  he  writes  to 
the  Minister,  "de  le  transferer  au  Donjon 
de  Vincennes,  ou  il  y  a  moins  de  prisonniers 
qu'a  la  Bastille,  et  de  l'y  oublier."  In  that 
phrase  are  exceeded  all  the  horrors  of 
Madame  Putiphar. 

Whatever  was  the  good  or  evil  reputa- 
tion of  the  Pompadour  who  figures  as 
Madame  Putiphar  in  his  pages,  I  find,  in  the 
evidently  veracious  and  documented  pages 
of  de  Latude,  confirmation  enough  to  justify 
that  part  of  Borel's  characterisation  which 
is  concerned  with  her  vindictive  and  destroy- 
ing frivolity.  "What  then  has  been  my 
crime?"  de  Latude  questions.  "At  the  age 
of  twenty-three  years,  misled  by  an  access 
of  ambition  which  was  simply  absurd,  I  dis- 
pleased la  Marquise  de  Pompadour,  I  of- 
183 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

fended  her,  if  you  will,  and  that  is  a  good 
deal  to  admit.  At  forty  years,  worn  out  by 
seventeen  years  of  captivity  and  of  tears": 
— but  not  yet  nearly  at  the  end  of  either. 
And  he  affirms:  "Also  she  has  never  given 
liberty,  as  it  is  asserted,  to  any  of  those 
whom  she  has  hurled  into  chains;  she  shut 
down  for  ever  in  the  dungeon  walls  their 
sighs  and  their  anger."  And  he  names 
(Borel  names  them  after  him)  a  Baron  de 
Venae,  who  was  imprisoned  in  the  Donjon 
for  nineteen  years  for  having  given  the 
Pompadour  a  piece  of  good  advice  which 
"humbled  her  pride";  a  Baron  de  Vissec, 
seventeen  years  imprisoned  on  the  suspicion 
that  he  had  spoken  against  her ;  a  Chevalier 
de  Rochequerault,  suspected  of  being  the 
writer  of  a  pamphlet  against  her,  imprisoned 
for  twenty- three  years.  Borel  and  Latude's 
books,  in  scarcely  less  impressive  ways, 
represent  the  moment  of  her  death,  and 
their  natural  hopes  that  a  personal  vengeance 
184 


PETRUS     BOREL 


would  be  set  right  at  last  by  the  law.  "I 
thought  I  saw  the  skies  purple  with  shame," 
de  Latude  tells  us.  "Not  even  the  idea  came 
to  me  that  there  could  be  any  delay  in 
breaking  my  chains."  For  de  Latude  and 
for  the  innocent  prisoners  of  Borel  no  key 
unlocks  a  door,  and  it  is  Borel  who  repre- 
sents the  dying  woman  writing  a  great  "no" 
in  a  last  refusal  of  mercy. 

All  this,  then,  and  the  episode  of  Mal- 
sherbes  visiting  a  prisoner  in  the  pit  of  a 
dungeon,  drawing  him  up  into  the  light, 
and  then  persuaded  by  false  tidings  to  leave 
him  to  his  fate,  is  historical  fact,  and  is 
used  by  Borel  as  part  of  a  story,  which  has 
so  much  of  the  document  where  it  seems 
most  the  invention  of  a  story-teller.  Not 
less  real,  in  its  properly  artificial  way,  is  the 
adventure  of  the  Parc-aux-Cerfs.  Borel 
seeks  too  often  such  local  colour  as  "aze- 
derach,"  a  Syrian  tree,  or  the  plants 
"mahaleb"    and    "aligousier."      Pedantry 

185 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

comes  in  here  as  in  other  ways  and  places; 
as  for  instance,  in  the  return  to  old  spell- 
ings in  avoit,  touts,  abyme,  gryllons.  Ped- 
antry passes  into  ignorance  in  certain 
English  words,  which  we  may  set  partly 
to  the  credit  of  those  printers  whom  he  calls 
to  account  on  one  of  his  last  pages.  Strange 
metaphors  flourish  on  all  the  pages,  as  when 
"il  lui  sembloit  qu'il  venoit  de  contracter 
avec  les  pieues  de  son  cachot,  avec  ses  f  ers, 
un  hymen  indissoluble,  un  hymen  eternal, 
ne  devant  rompre  qu'a  la  mort."  There  are 
windy  howlings,  the  "Lycanthropie"  I  sup- 
pose, and  at  times  grave  silences,  like  this, 
with  its  sombre  air  as  of  Villiers:  "Elle 
etoit  du  nombre  de  celles  qui  jamais  ne 
s'effacent."  Everywhere  there  is,  in  Baude- 
laire's phrase  about  him,  "le  charme  de  la 
volonte" ;  and  the  sign  that  "il  aimait  f  eroce- 
ment  les  lettres,"  as  the  same  great  critic 
characterised  him,  after  his  exact  manner, 
in  an  adverb. 
1907. 

186 


NOTES  ON  PARIS  AND 
PAUL  VERLAINE 


THE  ABSINTHE-DRINKER 

Gently  I  wave  the  visible  world  away. 
Far  off,  I  hear  a  roar,  afar  yet  near, 
Far  off  and  strange,  a  voice  is  in  my  ear, 
And  is  the  voice  my  own  ?  the  words  I  say 
Fall  strangely,  like  a  dream,  across  the  day; 
And  the  dim  sunshine  is  a  dream.    How  clear, 
New  as  the  world  to  lovers'  eyes,  appear 
The  men  and  women  passing  on  their  way! 

The  world  is  very  fair.    The  hours  are  all 
Linked  in  a  dance  of  mere  forgetfulness. 
I  am  at  peace  with  God  and  man.    O  glide, 
Sands  of  the  hour-glass  that  I  count  not,  fall 
Serenely:  scarce  I  feel  your  soft  caress, 
Rocked  on  this  dreamy  and  indifferent  tide. 

Boulevard  Saint  Germain. 

Aux  Deux  Magots, 

Paris,  1890. 


189 


AT  THE  CAFE  FRANgOIS  PREMIER 

Literary  French  Bohemia  congregates  in 
certain  cafes  of  the  Boulevard  St.  Michel 
— in  the  Cafe  Vachette,  the  Soleil  d'Or,  the 
Cafe  Francois  Premier.  When  I  was  in 
Paris  in  1890  it  was  at  the  Francois  Premier 
that  Verlaine  had  taken  up  his  headquarters, 
possibly  for  no  other  reason  than  that  it  was 
near  the  hotel  where  he  was  then  living. 
The  cafe  is  situated  high  up  the  boulevard, 
at  the  less  frequented  end — just  at  the  corner 
of  the  Rue  Gay-Lussac.  There  I  used  to 
meet  my  friends  the  Decadents  and  the 
Symbolistes. 

It  is  an  evening  in  May:  the  clock  points 

to  half-past  eleven.    I  am  strolling  along  in 

front  of  the  crowded  cafes,  watching  all  this 

delightful  effervescence  of  life — the  noisy, 

191 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


pleasant  gaiety  of  the  Boul'  Mich*  near  mid- 
night. Suddenly  I  hear  a  strident  voice  be- 
hind me:  "Comment  allez-vous,  Monsieur 
Symons?"  It  is  Jean  Moreas.  I  turn,  and 
he  asks  me  to  come  with  him  to  the  cafe. 
Moreas  is  a  Greek,  and  he  has  the  dark 
features,  blue-black  hair,  and  half-savage, 
half-sullen  black  eyes  which  characterise  the 
modern  Athenian.  An  eternal  monocle 
sticks  jauntily  in  his  eye.  As  we  walk  up 
the  boulevard  he  begins  to  talk  about  his 
poems.  At  that  time  Moreas — who  has 
since  published  a  volume,  he  Pelerin  Pas- 
sionne,  which  has  given  him  a  certain 
vogue — had  published  two  volumes — Les 
Syrtes  and  Les  Cantilenes.  There  is  a 
slight  but  genuine  inspiration  in  these  frag- 
mentary songs  and  ballads ;  one  finds  touches 
of  naive  charm,  a  faintly  fantastic  grace, 
a  quaint,  archaic  simplicity.  I  had  just  been 
reading  the  Cantilenes,  and  I  told  him 
how  some  of  the  pieces  had  charmed  me. 
192 


NOTES   ON    PARIS    AND    PAUL   VERLAINE 

He  began  to  recite,  waving  his  arm  and  roll- 
ing out  the  consonants  with  all  the  emphasis 
of  his  iron  voice.  Moreas  has  two  subjects 
of  conversation,  his  own  poems  and  Hamlet. 
He  does  not  recite  Hamlet,  but  the  poems 
he  recites  at  every  opportunity,  with  a  fine 
disregard  of  surroundings.  I  have  heard 
him  chanting  them  in  a  restaurant  to  the 
waitress,  the  charming  Celine,  surprised  but 
impartial.  In  time  we  reach  the  Cafe 
Frangois  Premier,  at  the  corner  of  the  Rue 
Gay-Lussac.  Voices  hail  us  from  a  table 
to  the  right.  There  we  find  Charles  Vig- 
nier,  author  of  a  book  of  verses  called 
Centon,  with  his  pale,  elegant,  perverse  face, 
his  blond  plausiveness,  always  a  veiled  sneer 
about  his  lips.  He  is  telling  a  dubious  story, 
with  a  feigned  air  of  remoteness,  and  the 
others  are  laughing.  Opposite  to  him  is 
Fernand  Langlois,  the  young  artist,  whom 
I  had  met  one  memorable  night  at  Ver- 
laine's.  He  is  incredibly  tall  and  thin  and 
193 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

youthful,  with  an  air  already  of  exhaustion, 
a  tired  grey  look  upon  his  features ;  he  speaks 
in  a  soft,  caressing,  feminine  voice,  with 
the  accents  of  a  petted  girl;  he  fixes  large 
brown  eyes  upon  you  with  a  troubling  in- 
tensity. Then  there  is  a  musician  whose 
name  I  forget — it  is  not  known  to  fame — a 
commonplace,  bourgeois  sort  of  person. 
And  there  are  others,  men  who  have  printed 
and  men  who  have  only  written  verses. 
The  conversation,  out  of  compliment  to  me, 
turns  upon  English  poetry.  They  are  very 
anxious  to  know  all  I  can  tell  them  about 
Swinburne.  Swinburne  is  well  known  by 
name  in  France,  and  since  then  an  admirable 
prose  translation  of  the  Poems  and  Bal- 
lads has  been  made  by  Gabriel  Mourey. 
They  question  me  about  Tennyson,  about 
Browning,  about  Rossetti;  they  want  to 
know  who  are  the  new  poets,  the  new  novel- 
ists; finally  they  insist  on  my  repeating  to 
them  some  English  poetry,  so  that  they  may 
194 


NOTES   ON    PARIS   AND   PAUL   VERLAINE 

hear  how  it  sounds — for  none  of  them  know 
English.  Midnight  has  long  past  when  the 
door  is  flung  open,  and  Verlaine  appears, 
followed  by  a  noisy  crowd  of  young  men. 
Verlaine  is  leaning  on  his  stick,  his  grey 
hat  is  pushed  back,  he  gesticulates,  explodes 
into  conversation.  When  at  last  he  can  be 
prevailed  upon  to  sit  down,  he  too  joins  in 
the  talk  about  things  English.  Verlaine  at 
one  time  spent  some  years  in  England,  and 
he  is  very  proud  of  his  knowledge  of  Eng- 
lish. The  conversation  has  become  dis- 
jointed. Vignier,  with  his  sceptical,  ironical 
smile  on  his  lips,  is  talking  in  a  low  voice 
to  a  man  who  sat  down  by  his  side;  Moreas 
is  thundering  out  some  of  his  resonant 
verses,  with  that  grand  wave  of  the  arm; 
more  "bocks"  are  being  ordered.  And  now 
all  around  there  is  a  movement,  a  rattle  of 
money,  the  sound  of  glasses  being  laid  down, 
a  hubbub  of  voices;  men  push  past  us  on 
their  way  to  the  door,  the  women  arrange 
195 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


their  hats  and  nod  farewells.  It  is  closing 
time.  "On  ferme,  Messieurs,  on  ferme!"' 
shouts  the  gerant.  Slowly,  slowly,  the  un- 
welcome warning  is  obeyed.  We  are  almost 
the  last  to  go,  and  we  file  out,  one  by  one, 
through  the  only  door  left  open  for  our  pas- 
sage. In  groups  of  two  or  three  we  stroll 
down  the  boulevard,  refreshingly  cool  after 
the  heated  interior.  I  walk  with  Fernand 
Langlois,  and  we  talk  of  art,  of  Gustave 
Moreau,  of  Puvis  de  Chavannes,  of  Burne- 
Jones,  of  Rossetti.  One  after  another  has 
dropped  off,  and  when  we  come  to  the  Rue 
Racine,  I  too  say  good-bye,  and  make  my 
way  homeward  to  my  hotel  under  the  shadow 
of  the  Odeon. 


196 


II 

THE  MAN 

Not  many  years  ago  Paul  Verlaine — 
whom  serious  critics  are  now  beginning  to 
speak  of  as  the  greatest  living  French  poet 
— was  almost  unknown,  even  in  France.  An 
odd  little  circle  of  Decadents  and  Sym- 
bolistes  had  the  wisdom  to  venerate  him  as 
a  master,  and  the  kindness  to  pay  for  his 
absinthe  at  the  Cafes.  Certain  writers,  like 
Huysmans — independent  of  these  narrow 
cliques — did  something  to  widen  a  reputa- 
tion which  had  so  far  been  merely  something 
vague,  something  rather  scandalous.  Then 
the  Andrew  Lang  of  Paris,  Jules  Lemaitre, 
took  up  this  more  or  less  obscure  writer  and 
handsomely  presented  him  to  the  boulevards. 
To-day  they  interview  him  in  the  Figaro, 
and  the  Gaulois  tells  you  which  hospital  he 
is  in  at  the  moment. 

197 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


/?%»• 


f<*~U 


'#**<*  S///7* 


^o^iiii^;  »j 


The  Characteristic  Signature  or  Paul  Verlaine 


198 


NOTES   ON    PARIS   AND   PAUL   VERLAINE 

The  greatest  living  French  poet  I  have 
called  him,  and  I  do  not  know  whose  claims' 
can  really  be  held  to  surpass  the  claims  of 
the  author  of  Romances  sans  Paroles  and 
Sagesse.  The  former  volume  I  remember 
seeing  in  Coppee's  book-case,  and  I  remem- 
ber wondering  whether  Coppee  had  ever 
thought  of  Verlaine  as  a  serious  rival.  Le- 
conte  de  Lisle,  Sully  Prudhomme,  Theodore 
de  Banville — all  admirable  poets,  each  in  his 
own  very  different  way — all  poets  who  have 
"succeeded,"  as  it  is  called;  but  I  for  one 
would  rather  have  written  the  little  song 
of  the  wind — 77  pleure  dans  mon  coeur — 
than  even  Un  Acte  de  Charite,  than  even 
Le  Vase  Brise,  than  even  the  deftest  of 
the  Odes  Funambulesques.  The  note  of 
Verlaine's  poetry  is  new  in  French  verse; 
his  form  is  new.  For  the  first  time  the 
French  language  has  become  capable  of  all 
the  delicate  songfulness  of  the  English 
language;  those  stiff,  impracticable  lines 
199 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


which  Victor  Hugo  bent,  Verlaine  has 
broken.  His  verse  is  as  lyrical  as  Shelley's, 
as  fluid,  as  magical — though  the  magic  is  a 
new  one.  It  is  a  twilight  art,  full  of  reti- 
cence, of  perfumed  shadows,  of  hushed 
melodies.  It  suggests,  it  gives  impressions, 
with  a  subtle  avoidance  of  any  too  definite 
or  precise  effect  of  line  or  colour.  The 
words  are  now  recherche,  now  confidently 
commonplace — words  of  the  boudoir,  words 
of  the  street!  The  impressions  are  remote 
and  fleeting  as  a  melody  evoked  from  the 
piano  by  a  frail  hand  in  the  darkness  of  a 
scented  room: 

"Qu'  est-ce  que  c'est  que  ce  berceau  soudain 
Qui  lentement  dorlote  mon  pauvre  etre? 
Que  voudrais-tu  de  moi,  doux  chant  badin  ? 
Qu'  as-tu  voulu,  fin  refrain  incertain, 
Qui  vas  tantot  mourir  vers  la  fenetre 
Ouverte  un  peu  sur  le  petit  jardin?" 

Or,  again,  the  impressions  are  as  close  and 
vivid  as  the  circling  flight  of  the  wooden 
200 


NOTES    ON    PARIS    AND    PAUL   VERLAINE 

horses  at  the  fair  of  St.  Gilles,  in  Brussels: 

"Tournez,  tournez,  bons  chevaux  de  bois, 
Tournez  cent  tours,  tournez  mille  tours; 
Tournez  souvent  et  tournez  tou jours, 
Tournez,  tournez  au  son  des  hautboisi" 

Or,  again,  they  are  as  sharp,  personal,  and 
brutal  as  the  song  of  prisoners  turning  "the 
mill  of  destiny" : 

"Allons,  f  reres,  bons  vieux  voleurs, 
Doux  vagabonds, 
Filons  en  fleur, 
Mes  chers,  mes  bons; 
Fumons  philosophiquement, 
Promenons-nous 
Paisiblement ; 
Rien  faire  est  doux." 

The  apparent  contradiction  between  the 
exquisite  and  the  brutal  part  of  Verlaine's 
work — almost  all  of  the  work  is  exquisite — 
is  simply  the  outcome  of  a  temperament 
which  has  always  been  untamable,  a  career 
201 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

which  has  been  impervious  to  every  influence 
but  the  sudden,  overwhelming  influence  of 
the  moment — towards  good,  or  towards  evil. 
Paul  Verlaine  was  born  at  Metz,  March' 
30,  1844.  His  father,  an  officer,  received 
his  baptism  of  fire  at  Waterloo.  Verlaine 
spend  his  childhood  at  Montpellier,  was 
educated  at  Paris,  and,  at  the  age  of  twenty- 
three,  brought  out,  under  the  wing  of  the 
Parnasse  Contemporain,  a  volume  of  verse, 
Poemes  Satumiens.  It  was  at  the  same  time 
that  Coppee  published  his  first  volume, 
equally  unnoticed  then,  Le  Reliquaire.  Two 
years  later  Verlaine  made  a  sort  of  literary 
success  with  the  Fetes  Galantes.  Next  year, 
in  1870,  occurred  his  unhappy  marriage — 
a  marriage  at  first  all  happiness — and  it  was 
in  honour  of  his  girl-wife  that  he  published 
a  tiny  book  of  verse,  La  Bonne  Chanson. 
When,  four  years  later,  the  Romances  sans 
Paroles  appeared,  Verlaine  had  already 
given  way  to  every  kind  of  self-indulgence, 

202 


Cartoon  of  Arthur  Rimbaud 


* 


NOTES   ON    PARIS   AND   PAUL   VERLAINE 

and  with  a  sort  of  mad  Bohemian  gaiety 
was  trailing  a  strange  companion,  the  young 
poet,  Arthur  Rimbaud,  over  France,  Brus- 
sels, Germany,  and  England.  The  pilgrim- 
age was  ended  by  a  pistol-shot  (I  have  heard 
Verlaine  talk  of  it,  very  coolly)  and  for 
eighteen  months  Verlaine  was  in  solitary 
confinement  at  Mons.  He  came  out  of 
prison  a  fervent  Catholic,  and  after  seven 
years'  silence  a  volume  of  religious  poems, 
Sag  esse  (1881) — one  of  the  most  sincere 
books  ever  written — was  published  obscurely 
at  the  office  of  a  Catholic  publisher  named 
Victor  Palme.  Verlaine's  faith  is  un- 
questionably genuine,  but  it  has  never  had 
a  very  appreciable  influence  upon  his  con- 
duct. Always  in  misery,  in  penury,  now 
lodging  at  the  expense  of  his  friends  in  some 
miserable  garni,  now,  a  little  more  com- 
fortably and  without  expense,  in  hospital,  he 
has  published  Jadis  et  Naguere  (1884),  a 
book  of  poems  which  represents  every  side 
203 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


of  his  work,  Amour  (1888),  a  pendant  to 
Sag  esse,  and  Parallelement  (1889),  i*s 
antithesis.  A  volume  of  privately  printed 
Dedicaces  (sonnets  to  his  friends)  appeared 
in  1890,  and  he  has  written  a  book  of  criti- 
cism, Les  Poetes  Maudits,  and  one  or  two 
collections  of  tales  in  prose.  A  new  volume 
of  poems,  Bonheur,  long  expected,  appeared 
in  1 89 1.  'Bonheur — Happiness — a  strange 
title  to  be  chosen  by  one  who  has  apparently 
had  so  little  of  it,  or  who  has  grasped  it 
with  so  feverish  a  haste  as  to  crush  it  in  the 
grasp.  But  Verlaine  is  perfectly  aware 
of  the  many  touches  of  irony  which  mark 
his  strange  career,  and  it  was  doubtless  not 
without  a  consciousness  of  the  full  signifi- 
cance of  the  word  that  he  named  a  volume 
of  his  poems  Sagesse — Wisdom. 


204 


Ill 

BONHEUR 

Some  years  ago,  in  a  book  rather  of  con- 
fession than  of  criticism,  Paul  Verlaine 
announced  his  intention  (somewhat  too 
formally,  perhaps)  of  dividing  his  poetic 
work  into  two  distinct  sections,  to  be  pub- 
lished in  parallel  series.  Sagesse,  Amour, 
Bonheur,  were  to  "make  for  righteousness" ; 
Parallelement  was  to  be  frankly  sensual; 
between  them,  he  imagined,  the  whole  man 
— that  strange,  composite,  though  not  com- 
plex nature — would  be  fully  and  finally  ex- 
pressed. Bonheur,  the  third  part,  complet- 
ing the  trilogy,  appeared  in  1891. 

Bonheur  is  written  very  much  in  the  style 
of  Sagesse,  and  a  great  part  of  it  might  be( 
assigned,  on  internal  evidence,  to  a  period 
anterior  to  Amour  and  Parallelement.  It 
has    none    of    the    perversity,    moral    and 

205 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


artistic,  of  the  latter  book,  despite  a  few 
experiments  upon  metre  and  rhyme.  Nor 
is  space  devoted,  as  occasionally  in  Amour, 
to  the  mere  courtesies  of  literary  friendship. 
The  verse  has  an  exquisite  simplicity,  a 
limpid  clearness,  a  strenuous  rejection  of 
every  sort  of  artistic  "dandyism" — the  word 
is  Verlaine's: 

"et  que  cet  arsenal, 
Chics   fougueux  et   froids,  mots  sees,  phrase  re- 

dondante, 
Et  cetera,  se  rende  a  l'emeute  grondante 
Des  sentiments  enfin  naturels  et  reels." 

I  take  these  lines  from  a  poem  which  may 
be  considered  a  new  "Art  Poetique."  In 
that  delicate  and  magical  poem — itself  the 
ideal  of  the  art  it  sang — Verlaine  said  noth- 
ing about  sincerity,  except,  inf erentially,  to 
the  fleeting  expression  of  something  almost 
too  vague  for  words.  Music  first  of  all  and 
before  all,  and  then,  not  colour,  but  the 
nuance,  the  last  fine  shade.  Poetry  is  to  be 
i  206 


Paul  Verlaine,  from  a  sketch  made  in  London 


NOTES   ON    PARIS   AND   PAUL   VERLAINE 

something  intangible,  a  winged  soul  in  flight 
"towards  other  skies  and  other  loves."  To 
express  the  inexpressible,  he  speaks  of 
beautiful  eyes  behind  a  veil,  of  the  full  pal- 
pitating sunlight  of  noon,  of  the  blue  swarm 
of  clear  stars  in  a  cool  autumn  sky ;  and  the 
verse  in  which  he  makes  his  confession  of 
faith  has  the  exquisite  troubled  beauty — 
"sans  rien  en  lui  qui  pese  ou  qui  pose" — 
which  he  commends  as  the  essential  poetry. 
Now,  in  this  new  poem  of  poetical  counsel, 
he  tells  us  that  art  should,  first  of  all,  be 
absolutely  clear  and  sincere;  it  is  the  law 
of  necessity,  hard,  no  doubt,  but  the  law: 

"L'art,  mes   en f ants,   c'est  d'etre  absolument   soi- 

meme. 
Foin!  d'un  art  qui  blaspheme  et  fi!  d'un  art  qui 

pose, 
Et  vive  un  vers  bien  simple,  autrement  c'est  la 

prose." 

The  verse  in  Bonheur  is  indeed  "bien 
simple."    There  is  a  poem  addressed  to  a 
207 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


friend — "Mon  ami,  ma  plus  belle  amitie,  ma 
meilleure" — which  even  Verlaine  has  hardly 
excelled  in  a  kind  of  plaintive  sincerity,  full 
of  the  beauty  of  simple  human  feeling,  seek- 
ing and  finding  the  most  direct  expression: 

"Aussi,  precieux  toi  plus  cher  que  tous  les  moi 
Que  je  fus  et  serai  si  doit  durer  ma  vie, 
Soyons  tout  l'un  pour  l'autre  en  depit  de  l'envie, 
Soyons  tout  l'un  a  l'autre  en  toute  bonne  foi." 

Verlaine  speaks  to  his  friend  as  if  he  would 
say  more  for  friendship  than  has  ever  been 
said  before.  He  would  fain  find  words  close 
and  gracious  enough  to  express  all  the  in- 
timacy and  charm  of  their  friendship: 

"Elle  verse  a  mes  yeux,  qui  ne  pleureront  plus, 
Un  paisible  sommeil,  dans  la  nuit  transparente 
Que  de  reves  legers  benissent,  troupe  errante 
De  souvenirs  futurs  et  d'espoirs  revolus." 

"Remembrances  to  be,  and  hopes  returned 
again" — how  lovely  a  verse,  French  or  Eng- 
lish!   And  the  emotion,  temperate  and  re- 
208 


NOTES   ON    PARIS   AND   PAUL  VERLAINE 

strained  through  most  of  the  poem,  rises  at 
the  end  into  exaltation: 

"Afin  qu'enfin  ce  Jesus-Christ  qui  nous  crea 
Nous  fasse  grace  et  fasse  grace  au  monde  immonde 
D'autour  de  nous  alors  unis — paix  sans  seconde! — 
Definitivement,  et  dicte:    Alleluia." 

I  quote  this  stanza  not  only  because  of  its 
place  in  the  poem — its  expression  of  the 
culminating  emotion — but  because  it  is  an 
excellent  example  of  Verlaine's  most  char- 
acteristic technique.  Note  the  rhyme  at  the 
beginning  of  the  first  line  and  at  the  end  of 
the  second,  the  alliteration,  the  curious  effect 
produced  by  the  repetition  of  "fasse  grace" 
(itself  an  assonance),  the  tormented  rhythm 
throughout,  the  arbitrary  and  extraordinary 
position  and  transposition  of  accents.  It 
cannot  be  said  that  all  these  experiences 
are  always  and  equally  successful;  but  it  is 
useless  to  deny  that  Verlaine  has  widened 
the  capacities  of  French  verse.  He  has  done 
209 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

what  Goncourt  has  done  in  his  prose:  he 
has  contributed  to  the  destruction  of  a 
classical  language,  which,  within  its  narrow 
limits,  had  its  own  perfection.  But  how 
great  a  gain  there  has  been,  along  with  this 
inevitable  loss!  In  the  hands  of  the  noisy 
little  school  of  Decadents,  the  brainsick 
little  school  of  Symbolistes,  both  claiming 
Verlaine  as  a  master,  these  innovations  have 
of  course  been  carried  to  the  furthest  limits 
of  unconscious  caricature.  In  Paris,  a  facti- 
tious clamour  arose  about  a  young  Greek, 
Jean  Moreas,  a  person  who  at  one  time  had 
a  very  distinct  talent  for  verse,  which  he 
wrote  in  regular  metre,  and  without  more 
of  foreign  idiom  than  his  Athenian  origin 
would  lead  one  to  expect.  As  one  of  his 
admirers  calmly  remarks,  "il  repudie  toute 
regie  preetablie  pour  la  contexture  de  ses 
vers."  From  these  extravagances  Verlaine 
has  always  held  aloof ;  and  in  an  article  pub- 
lished in  1890  he  has  given  his  opinion  very 
210 


NOTES   ON    PARIS    AND    PAUL   VERLAINE 

frankly  on  those  young  confreres  who  re- 
proach him,  he  tells  us,  "with  having  kept 
a  metre,  and  in  this  metre  some  caesura, 
and  rhymes  at  the  end  of  the  lines.  Mon 
Dieu!"  he  adds,  "I  thought  I  had  'broken' 
verse  quite  sufficiently."  In  Bonheur,  for 
the  first  time  in  his  work,  there  is  one  short 
poem — a  concession  to  these  young  con- 
freres—  written  in  irregular  unrhymed 
verse:  verse,  however,  which  is  still  verse, 
and  not  delirious  prose.  There  are  also  two 
poems  in  assonant  verse,  one  of  them  in 
lines  of  fourteen  syllables,  metrically  quite 
regular.  It  is  difficult  to  see  any  reason  for 
the  rejection  of  rhymes,  but  at  all  events 
they  are  rejected  without  disdain — frankly 
for  a  caprice. 

Almost  all  the  poems  in  Bonheur  are 
closely  personal — confessions  of  weakness, 
confessions  of  penitence,  confessions  of 
'Tennui  de  vivre  avec  les  gens  et  dans  les 
choses,"  confessions  of  good  attempts  foiled, 
211 


COLOUR    STUDIES   IN    PARIS 


of  unachieved  resolutions.  With  a  touch  of 
characteristic  self-criticism  Verlaine  says  in 
one  place  : 

"Mais,  helas!  je  ratiocine 
Sur  mes  fautes  et  mes  douleurs, 
Espece  de  mauvais  Racine 
Analysant  jusqu'a  mes  pleurs." 

And  in  its  measure  and  degree  this  is  true: 
there  are  times  when  confession  becomes 
analysis,  not  to  the  advantage  of  the  poetry. 
But,  here  as  in  Sagesse,  the  really  dis- 
tinguishing work  is  an  outpouring  of  desires 
that  speak  the  language  of  desire,  of  prayers 
that  go  up  to  God  as  prayers,  not  as  litera- 
ture; of  confessions  that  have  no  reticences. 
One  of  the  finest  pieces  tells  the  story  of 
that  endeavour  to  rebuild  the  ruined  house 
of  life  which  Verlaine  made  at  the  time  of 
his  conversion,  after  those  calm  and  salutary 
eighteen  months  of  seclusion.  This  in- 
tensely personal  poem,  which  is  really  a  piece 

212 


NOTES   ON    PARIS   AND   PAUL   VERLAINE 

of  the  most  exact  autobiography,  becomes  a 
symbol  of  all  lives  that  have  fallen,  that 
have  struggled  to  rise,  that  have  failed  in 
the  endeavour.  Towards  the  end  the  emo- 
tion rises  in  a  crescendo,  half  of  despair,  half 
of  hope,  as  he  cries  out  in  the  very  fury 
of  helplessness  against  the  worst  of  foes — 

"Vous  tou jours,  vil  cri  de  haro, 
Qui  me  proclame  et  me  diffame, 
Gueuse  inepte,  lache  bourreau, 
Horrible,  horrible,  horrible  femme! 

"Vous,  l'insultant  mensonge  noir, 
La  haine  longue,  raffront  ranee, 
Vous  qui  seriez  le  desespoir, 
Si  la  Foi  n'etait  l'Esperance. 

"Et  l'Esperance  le  pardon, 
Et  ce  pardon  une  vengeance. 
Mais  quel  voluptueux  pardon, 
Quelle  savoureuse  vengeance!" 

Elsewhere  he  writes  of  his  life  in  hospital 

— "last  home  perhaps,  and  best,  the  hos- 

213 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


pital";  of  his  child- wife,  for  whose  memory 
he  has  so  strange  a  mixture  of  regretful 
complaint  and  unassuaged  self-reproach; 
and  always  he  returns  to  the  burden  of 
"Priez  avec  et  pour  le  pauvre  Lelian!" 


214 


IV 

EPIGRAMMES 

In  this  little  book  of  Epigrammes,  Ver- 
laine  tells  us  he  has  tried  to  do  something 
o{  what  Goethe  did  in  the  Westoestlicher 
Divan,  but  "en  sourdine,  a  ma  maniere." 
And,  indeed,  there  is  a  new  note,  as  of  a 
personality  for  once  somewhat  impersonal, 
concerned  with  general  questions  (always 
individually  apprehended),  with  the  inter- 
est of  moral  ideas,  the  charm  of  exterior 
things.  The  book  was  written  in  the  calm 
retirement  of  that  beautiful  and  fantastic 
hospital,  Saint-Louis,  which  lies,  like  a  little 
walled  city  of  the  middle  ages,  in  the  midst 
of  the  squalid  and  entertaining  neighbour- 
hood of  the  Canal  Saint-Martin.  It  was 
written  in  a  time  of  unusual  quiet,  written 
quietly,  without  excitement,  and  from 
memory,  as  one  might  say,  a  memory  for 

215 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


once  of  the  head,  not  of  the  heart  or  the 
senses.  In  the  introductory  verses  we  find 
already  the  real,  evasive  Verlaine,  calming 
down,  as  he  fancies  or  fears,  to  a  certain 
indifference.  "Les  extremes  opinions"  of 
the  past  are  to  be  more  or  less  abandoned; 
as  for  the  wiles  of  woman,  "on  finit  par 
s'habituer" ;  the  sharper  clarion  notes  of  the 
day — "le  clairon  fou  de  l'aurore" — fade  into 
a  dim  fluting  under  the  fading  sunset;  one 
is  simply  tired,  and  not  too  unwilling  for 
sleep. 

Quand  nous  irons,  si  je  dois  encor  la  voir, 
Dans  l'obscurite  du  bois  noir, 

Quand  nous  serons  ivres  d'air  ct  dc  lumiere 
Au  bord  de  la  claire  riviere, 

Quand  nous  serons  d'un  moment  depayses 
De  ce  Paris  aux  coeurs  brises, 

Et  si  la  bonte  lente  de  la  nature 
Nous  berce  d'un  reve  qui  dure, 

Alors,  allons  dormir  du  dernier  sommeil! 
Dieu  se  chargera  du  reveil. 
2l6 


NOTES   ON    PARIS   AND   PAUL   VERLAINE 

This,  then,  is  the  note  of  the  book;  and 
in  such  a  mood  the  memory  of  certain  quaint 
or  charming  impressions  comes  up  very 
happily.  Japanese  art,  "lourd  comme  un 
crapaud,  leger  comme  un  oiseau" :  the  Ronde 
de  Nuit,  seen  at  Amsterdam;  Cazals*  latest 
portrait  of  himself,  the  spectral  back  view 
which  serves  as  frontispiece  to  the  book; 
the  haunting  sound  of  a  barrel-organ — 

Bruit  humain,  fait  de  cris  et  de  lentes  souffrances 
Dans  le  soleil  couchant  au  loin  d'un  long  chemin — 

it  is  such  sights  and  sounds  as  these  that 
Verlaine  evokes,  in  a  series  of  delicately 
wrought  little  poems,  more  carefully  written, 
for  the  most  part,  than  much  of  his  later 
verse.  And  there  is  one  specially  charming 
poem  on  the  ballet: — 

Mon  age  mur  qui  ne  grommelle 
En  somme  qu'encore  tres  peu 
Aime  le  joli  pele-mele 
D'un  ballet  turc  ou  camaieu. 
217 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


And  the  poem,  if  we  mistake  not,  is  a 
reminiscence  of  a  certain  memorable  even- 
ing at  the  Alhambra,  and  it  recalls,  quaintly, 
deliciously,  a  certain  quaint  and  delicious 
paradox  which  summed  up  a  personal  and 
poetical  view  of  life  and  art :  "J'aime  Shaks- 
peare,"  said  Verlaine,  "mais  j'aime  mieux 
le  ballet !" 


218 


V 

CONFESSIONS 

The  Confessions  of  Verlaine — autobi- 
ographical notes  from  1844,  the  year  when 
he  was  born,  to  1871,  the  year  which  proved 
the  disastrous  turning-point  in  his  life — are 
quite  unlike  the  confessions  of  any  one  else, 
and  have  a  charm  of  their  own  as  individual 
as  the  charm  of  his  verse.  They  tell,  in  a 
vague  and  yet  precise  way,  in  a  manner  of 
extreme  simplicity  which  suggests  even 
more  than  it  says,  and  by  means  of  a 
series  of  little  facts,  little  impressions — 
"nuances  presque  infinitesimales  qui  ont,  a 
mes  yeux,  leur  importance  tres  serieuse" — 
the  story  of  "une  vie  beaucoup  en  nuances." 
And  they  tell  all  this  in  an  easy,  casual  man- 
ner (as  it  would  seem),  mainly  by  means 
of  an  extraordinary  visual  memory.  "Les 
yeux  surtout  chez  moi  furent  precoces:  je 
219 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


fixais  tout,  rien  ne  m'echappait  de  formes, 
de  couleurs,  d'ombres.  Le  jour  me  fas- 
cinait  et  bien  que  j'etais  poltron  dans  l'ob- 
scurite,  la  nuit  m'attirait,  une  curiosite 
m'y  poussait,  j'y  cherchais  je  ne  sais  quoi, 
du  blanc,  du  gris,  des  nuances  peut-etre." 
The  book,  despite  the  deliberate  evasiveness 
of  its  method:  "n'importe,  sans  plus  m'ap- 
pesantir,  tout  simplement — en  choisissant, 
elaguant,  eludant?  pas  trop — m'y  void,"  is 
a  subtle  piece  of  psychology,  the  half-uncon- 
scious self -revelation  of  a  man  who  has  al- 
ways been  the  creature  of  violent  and  un- 
certain instinct,  who  has  never  possessed 
himself,  but  who  has  always  been  curious 
as  to  his  own  qualities,  not  quite  understand- 
ing them,  and  yet  always  so  anxious  to 
"confess."  In  this  book,  and  not  alone  in 
the  chapters  relating  to  his  childhood,  he  is 
always  childlike  in  his  frankness,  his  sim- 
plicity, and  in  the  sincere,  natural  way  in 
which  he  speaks  of  his  follies  and  infirmities 
220 


NOTES  ON   PARIS   AND   PAUL   VERLAINE 

— "la  manie,  la  fureur  de  boire,"  and  the 
rest. 

And  in  all  the  later  part  of  the  book,  the 
story  of  his  falling  in  love,  his  marriage, 
with  but  a  hint  of  that  "espece  d'enfer  in- 
termittent," which  married  life  too  soon 
became,  there  is  an  ingenuous  directness 
which  has  again  all  the  charm  of  a  child's 
narrative  of  things.  This  love  story  (hinted 
at  in  La  Bonne  Chanson,  which  he  tells 
us  has  always  remained  the  dearest  to  him 
of  his  books)  is  one  of  the  prettiest  idylls 
of  young  love  ever  written.  It  is  like  noth- 
ing else  in  its  intense  humanity  and  its 
virginal  delicacy.  Of  the  more  disorderly 
side  of  a  life  which  was  even  then  far  from 
reticent,  we  hear  but  little:  that  little  ad- 
mirably precise,  significant,  and  restrained. 
Nor  does  literature  come  very  much  into  the 
scheme  of  these  notes,  though  such  indica- 
tions as  there  are  have  a  real  biographical 
value,  as,  for  instance,  the  story  of  how  the 
221 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


literary  instinct  awoke,  at  the  age  of  four- 
teen, with  the  surreptitious  reading  of 
Baudelaire's  Fleurs  du  Mai,  which  the 
child  was  so  far  from  understanding  as  to 
imagine  even  that  the  book  "s'appelait  tout 
bonnement :  Les  fleups  de  Mai." 


222 


VI 

DEDICACES 

Verlaine's  latest  book  of  poems  is  truly 
described  on  the  title-page  as  nouvelle 
edition  augmentee.  In  its  first,  privately 
printed,  edition,  it  was  scarcely  more  than 
a  pamphlet.  In  its  final  shape  it  is  much 
the  largest  book  that  Verlaine  has  ever  pub- 
lished. It  is  not  one  of  the  best,  nor,  in- 
deed, could  one  expect  it  to  be;  for  it  is  an 
informal  bundle  of  friendly  greetings, 
rather  than  a  careful  selection  of  verse, 
chosen  for  its  own  sake.  In  verse,  much 
of  which  was  written  to  order — at  the  order, 
that  is,  of  a  most  friendly  disposition — we 
are  not  likely  to  find  the  more  poignant 
sentiment,  or  the  more  exquisite  form,  which 
we  find  in  Sagesse,  for  instance,  or  in  the 
Fetes  galantes.  On  the  contrary,  it  is  only 
natural  that  one  should  come  across  many 
223 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

instances  of  that  slovenliness  of  workman- 
ship which  mars  so  much  of  Verlaine's  later 
work,  in  its  exaggeration  of  certain  curious 
virtues  of  style  which  he  was  one  of  the  first 
to  discover.  For  instance,  there  is  the  en- 
jatnbement,  or  running  of  one  line  into 
another,  to  which  Verlaine  has  been  so 
singularly  successful  in  giving  just  that  air 
of  choice  simplicity  which  is  one  of  the  sur- 
prises of  his  manner  of  writing.  Here,  only 
too  often,  the  lines  run  into  one  another 
merely  because  they  happen  to  come  in  that 
way,  with  rhymes  at  the  end  of  a  certain 
counted  number  of  syllables.  Then  the  son- 
nets— the  book  is  for  the  most  part  written 
in  this  form — are  constructed  after  every 
shape,  possible  and  impossible,  in  alternate 
short  and  long  lines,  in  short  lines  with  a 
long  line  at  the  end,  in  infinite  malforma- 
tions of  rhyme-arrangement,  and  (I  note 
with  less  regret)  in  that  curious  form,  "la 
queue  en  l'air,"  which  Huysmans  compares 

224 


NOTES   ON    PARIS   AND   PAUL   VERLAINE 

to  "certains  poissons  japonais  en  terre  poly- 
chrome qui  posent  sur  leur  socle,  les  ouiies 
en  bas."  And,  while  few  of  the  sonnets  are 
without  a  touch  of  the  familiar  magic,  there 
are  not  a  few  which  have  but  one  touch. 
Yet,  after  all  our  reservations  are  made, 
the  book  contains  a  large  amount  of  really 
excellent  work,  and  almost  all  of  it  is  full 

An  Invitation  from  MallarmS 
225 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


of  personal  interest,  and,  indeed,  interest  of 
various  kinds.  What  a  medley  of  names  I 
find  here  among  these  Dedicaces:  famous 
names,  Coppee,  Dierx,  Mallarme,  Huys- 
mans,  Leon  Cladel,  by  the  side  of  anarchists 
after  the  order  of  Paterne  Berrichon,  ec- 
centrics like  Bibi-Puree,  the  fag  and  butt 
of  the  Latin  Quarter;  then  there  is  the 
"cabaretier  miraculeux"  of  the  Chat-Noir, 
Rodolphe  Salis,  and  even  the  "Gerant  du 
Muller" ;  there  are  some  doctors,  a  sculptor, 
a  musician,  a  painter;  friends  in  London, 
with  a  charming  little  miniature  of  Fountain 
Court : — 

La  Cour  de  la  fontaine  est,  dans  le  Temple, 
Un  coin  exquis  de  ce  coin  delicat. 

And  there  are  certain  women,  too,  addressed 
under  discreet  initials,  now  with  little  homely 
details,  as  in  the  elegy  on  the  death  and 
funeral  of  "E's"  goldfinch— 

Tu  repris,  et  cela  me  parut  aussi  beau: 
"U  aurait  peut-etre  mieux  fait  sur  mon  chapeau !" — 
226 


NOTES   ON    PARIS   AND   PAUL   VERLAINE 

or  the  even  more  charming  poem  on  "Ph's" 
little  dog  that  died  in  babyhood,  "Ses  pattes 
freles  en  l'air,  comme  les  oiseaux";  now 
more  intimately  and  more  pathetically  per- 
sonal, as  in  the  verses,  "Encore  pour  G.," 
with  their  desolate  ending : 

Et  je  m'ennuie, — ainsi  la  pluie, 

Et  je  me  pleure  et  je  m'essuie 

Les  yeux  parce  que  je  m'ennuie, 

Parce  que  je  suis  vieux  et  parce  que  je  t'aime. 

And,  again,  there  are  two  splendid  and 
resonant  sonnets  to  Arthur  Rimbaud, 
touched  with  that  exaltation  which  informs 
everything  that  Verlaine  writes  of  his  dead 
friend ;  one  of  them,  the  first,  being  perhaps 
the  finest  poem  in  the  book.  In  these  son- 
nets the  mainly  familiar  style  is  lifted,  as  it 
is  also  in  the  sonnet  to  Laurent  Tailhadc 


Le  pretre  et  sa  chasuble  enorme  d'or  jusques  aux 
pieds — 

where  the  words  assume  a  sort  of  hieratic 

splendour,  as  of  the  very  vestments  they 

227 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


describe.  Somewhat  the  same  note  reap- 
pears in  the  sonnet  to  Villiers  de  l'lsle 
Adam,  and  again  in  the  early  sonnet  to 
Charles  Morice — Imperial,  royal,  sacer- 
dotal— which  is  reprinted,  with  five  others, 
from  Amour.  This  note,  however,  com- 
paratively rare  in  Verlaine's  work  in  general, 
is  but  seldom  heard  in  these  Dedicaces. 
More  really  characteristic  is  the  vaguely  and 
singularly  pathetic  sonnet  on  Fernand 
Langlois : — 

Haut  comme  le  soleil,  pale  comme  la  lune, 
Comme  dit  vaguement  le  proverbe  espagnol, 
II  a  presque  la  voix  tendre  du  rossignol, 
Tant  son  coeur  fut  clement  a  ma  triste  fortune. 

And  still  more  characteristic  of  the  general 
tone  of  the  volume  is  this  brave,  frank,  open- 
air  sonnet  to  Irenee  Decroix: — 

Ou  sont  les  nuits  de  grands  chemins  aux  chants 
bacchiques 

Dans  les  Nords  noirs  et  dans  les  verts   Pas-de- 
Calais, 

228 


NOTES   ON    PARIS   AND   PAUL  VERLAINE 

Et  les  canaux  periculeux  vers  les  Belgiques 
Ou,  gris,  on  chavirait  en  hurlant  des  couplets? 

Car  on  riait  dans  ces  temps-la. — Tuiles  et  briques 
Poudroyaient  par  la  plaine  en  hameaux  assez  laids ; 
Les  fourbouyeres,  leurs  pipes  et  leurs  bourriques 
Devalaient  sur  Arras,  la  ville  aux  toits  follets 

Poignardant,  espagnols,  ces  ciels  epais  de  Flandre; 
Douai  brandissait  de  son  cote,  pour  s'en  defendre, 
Son  lourd  beffroi  carre,  si  leger  cependant; 

Lille  et  sa  biere  et  ses  moulins  a  vent  sans  nombre 
Bruissaient. — Oui,    qui    nous    rendra,    cher    ami, 

l'ombre 
Des  bonnes  nuits,  et  les  beaux  jours  au  rire  ardent  ? 

It  is  this  simpler,  more  easily  good- 
humoured  way  of  taking  life,  without  ask- 
ing too  much  or  revolting  too  desperately, 
which  is  becoming  Verlaine's  final  (dare  one 
say  final?)  creed.  Of  a  nature  made  up  of 
so  many  irreconcilable  elements,  we  get  here 
mainly  the  less  poignant  side;  not  so  much 
that 

Moi,  l'ombre  du  marquis  de  Sade,  et  ce,  parmi 
Parfois  des  airs  naifs  et  faux  de  bon  apotre, 
229 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

but  the  facile,  childlike  part  of  that  simplicity 
which  can  be  so  terribly  and  inconveniently 
in  earnest.  Here,  then,  for  the  present — 
for  with  Verlaine  we  can  count  only  on  the 
actual  moment  as  it  passes,  not  on  any 
memory  of  the  moment  that  has  gone  before, 
or  any  probability  as  to  the  moment  that  is 
to  come  after — here  is  the  conclusion  of  the 
whole  matter: — 

Bah!  nous  aurons  eu  notre  plasir 
Qui  n'est  pas  celui  de  tout  le  monde 
Et  le  loisir  de  notre  desir. 

Aussi  benissons  la  paix  profonde 
Qu'a  defaut  d'un  tressor  moins  subtil 
Nous  donnerent  ces  ainsi  soit-il. 


230 


VII 

"INVECTIVES" 

I  never  read  a  book  with  more  regret 
than  this  book  of  Invectives,  which  has 
appeared  since  the  death  of  Verlaine.  I  do 
not  see  why  it  should  not  have  been  written, 
if  the  writing  of  a  petulance  helped  to  clear 
that  petulance  away.  But  what  might  have 
been  a  sort  of  sad  or  vexed  amusement  to 
Verlaine,  in  some  sleepless  hour  in  hospital, 
should  never  have  been  taken  for  more  than 
what  it  was,  and  should  never,  certainly, 
have  gone  further  than  one  of  the  best- 
locked  cupboards  in  Vanier's  publishing 
office.  I  should  like  to  think  that  Verlaine 
never  intended  it  to  go  further;  and  I  am 
quite  sure  that,  in  the  first  instance,  he 
never  did  intend  it  to  go  further.  But  I 
know  Vanier,  and  I  know  that  whatever 
Vanier  got  hold  of  he  was  not  likely  to  lose. 
231 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


Gradually  the  petulances  would  have  heaped 
themselves  one  upon  another,  until  they  had 
come  to  about  the  size  of  a  book.  Then 
there  would  be  the  suggestion:  why  should 
we  not  make  a  book  of  them?  Then  jest 
would  turn  into  earnest;  Verlaine  would  be 
persuaded  that  he  was  a  great  satirist :  it  was 
so  easy  to  persuade  him  of  anything!  And 
now  here  is  the  book. 

Well,  the  book  has  some  admirable  things 
in  it,  and,  as  perhaps  the  most  admirable, 
I  will  quote  a  piece  called  Deception": 

"Satan  de  sort,  Diable  d'argerit!" 
Parut  le  Diable 
Qui  me  dit:    "L'homme  intelligent 
Et  raisonnable, 

"Que  te  void,  que  me  veux-tu? 

Car  tu  m'evoques 
Et  je  crois,  1'homme  tout  vertu, 
Que  tu  m'invoques. 

"Or  je  me  mets,  suis-je  gentil? 
A  ton  service: 
Dis  ton  voeu  naif  ou  subtil; 
Betise  ou  vice? 

232 


NOTES   ON   PARIS   AND   PAUL  VERLAINE 

"Que  dois-je  pour  faire  plaisir 
A  ta  sagesse? 
L'impuissance  ou  bien  le  desir 
Croissant  sans  cesse? 

"L'indifference  ou  bien  Tabus? 
Parle,  que  puis-je?" 
Je  repondis:     "Tout  vins  sont  bus, 
Plus  de  prestige, 

"La  femme  trompe  et  l'homme  aussi, 
Je  suis  malade, 
JE  VEUX  MOURIR."  Le  Diable:  "Si 
Cest  la  l'aubade. 

"Qu  tu  m'offres,  je  rentre.    En  Bas. 
Tuer  m'offusque. 
Bon  pour  ton  Dieu.    Je  ne  suis  pas 
A  ce  point  brusque." 

Diable  d'argent  et  par  la  mort! 

Partit  le  Diable, 
Me  laissant  en  proie  a  ce  sort 

Irremediable. 

In  such  a  poem  as  this  we  have  the  Verlaine 
of  the  finer  parts  of  Parallelement.  But 
what  of  the  little  jokes  for  and  against 
M.  Moreas,  the  pointless  attack  on  Leconte 
de  Lisle,  the  unworthy  rage  against  M.  Rod, 
233 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


the  political  squibs,  the  complaints  against 
doctors  and  magistrates,  the  condescension 
to  the  manner  of  M.  Raoul  Ponchon? 
Here  is  neither  a  devouring  rage,  which 
must  flame  itself  out,  nor  a  fine  malice, 
justifying  its  existence,  as  the  serpent  does 
by  the  beauty  of  its  coils.  Verlaine's  furies, 
which  were  frequent,  were  too  brief,  and 
too  near  the  surface,  to  be  of  much  use  to 
him  in  the  making  of  art.  He  was  a  big 
child,  and  his  furies  meant  no  more  than 
the  squalling  and  kicking  of  a  baby.  His 
nature  was  essentially  good-humoured,  find- 
ing pleasure  on  the  smallest  opportunity; 
often  despondent,  and  for  reasons  enough, 
but  for  the  most  part,  and  in  spite  of  every- 
thing— ill-health,  poverty,  interminable  em- 
barrassments— full  of  a  brave  gaiety.  He 
often  grumbled,  even  then,  with  a  sort  of 
cheerfulness;  and  when  he  grumbled  he 
used  very  colloquial  language,  some  of  which 
you   will   not   find   in   the   dictionaries   of 

234 


NOTES   ON    PARIS   AND   PAUL   VERLAINE 

classical  French.  These  poems  are  his 
grumblings;  only,  unfortunately,  they  are 
written  down,  and  we  can  read  them  in 
print,  critically,  instead  of  listening  to  them 
in  sympathetic  amusement.  And  what  in- 
justice they  do  him,  alike  as  poet  and  man! 
How  impossible  it  will  be,  now  that  this  book 
has  appeared,  to  convince  anyone  to  whom 
Verlaine  is  but  a  name,  that  the  writer  of 
these  Invectives  was  the  most  charming, 
the  most  lovable  of  men.  The  poet  will  re- 
cover from  it,  for,  at  all  events,  there  are 
the  Fetes  Galantes,  the  Romances  sans 
Paroles,  Sag  esse,  Amour,  and  the  others, 
which  one  need  but  turn  to,  and  which  are 
there  for  all  eyes.    But  the  man ! 

Well,  the  man  will  soon  become  a  legend, 
and  this  book  will,  no  doubt,  be  one  of  the 
many  contradictory  chapters  of  the  legend. 
In  a  few  years'  time  Verlaine  will  have  be- 
come as  distant,  as  dubious,  as  distorted,  as 
Gilles  de  Retz.  He  will  once  more  re-enter 
235 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


that  shadow  of  unknown  horror  from  which 
he  has  but  latterly  emerged.  People  will 
refuse  to  believe  that  he  was  not  always 
drunk,  or  singing  "Chansons  pour  elle." 
They  will  see  in  his  sincere  Catholicism  only 
what  des  Esseintes,  in  the  book  of  Huys- 
mans,  saw  in  it:  "Des  reveries  clandestines, 
des  fictions  d'un  amour  occulte  pour  une 
Madone  byzantine  qui  se  muait,  a  un  certain 
moment,  en  une  Cydalise  egaree  dans  notre 
siecle."  And  they  will  see,  perhaps,  only  a 
poetical  licence  in  such  lines  as  these,  in 
which,  years  ago,  Verlaine  said  all  that  need 
ever  be  said  in  excuse,  or  in  explanation  of 
the  problem  of  himself: 

Un  mot  encore,  car  je  vous  doit 
Quelque  lueur  en  definitive 
Concernant  la  chose  qui  m'arrive: 
Je  compte  parmi  les  maladroits. 

J'ai  perdu  ma  vie  et  je  sais  bien 
Que  tout  blame  sur  moi  s'en  va  fondre: 
A  cela  je  ne  puis  que  repondre 
Que  je  suis  vraiment  ne  Saturnien. 
236 


A  PRINCE  OF  COURT 
PAINTERS 


A  PRINCE  OF  COURT  PAINTERS 

All  Watteau  is  in  that  Imaginary 
Portrait  which  Walter  Pater  wrote  in  the 
form  of  extracts  from  the  diary  of  Wat- 
teau's  neighbour  and  friend  at  Valenciennes, 
the  daughter  of  Antoine  Pater,  "maitre 
sculpteur,"  and  the  sister  of  Jean  Baptiste 
Pater,  Watteau's  only  pupil.  The  family 
of  Walter  Pater  came  from  that  part  of 
Flanders,  and  was,  indeed,  closely  connected 
with  the  family  of  the  painter,  and  in  writ- 
ing these  extracts  from  the  diary  it  amused 
him  to  reconstruct  what  might  well  have 
been  some  of  his  family  papers.  For  the 
facts  of  Watteau's  life  he  went  to  the  care- 
fully documented  essay  of  the  Goncourts, 
and  especially  to  the  contemporary  narrative 
which  they  printed  from  a  MS.  In  the  new 
life  of  Watteau,  by  M.  Virgile  Josz,  we 
have  for  the  first  time  a  quite  trustworthy 
239 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


biography,  in  which  some  new  facts  are 
established  and  some  slight  but  important 
corrections  made.  How  well  M.  Josz  knows 
the  life  and  art  of  the  18th  century  his 
previous  study  of  Fragonard  has  already 
shown.  His  new  book  has  the  charm  of  a 
brilliant  historical  novel,  and  it  is  everywhere 
founded  upon  precise  documents.  He  has 
the  art  of  weaving  a  narrative  full  of  colour, 
full  of  picturesque  detail,  in  which  careful 
research  and  subtle  criticism  become  part  of 
an  unfatiguing  entertainment.  No  really 
serious  critic  and  historian  of  art  at  the 
present  day  has  so  light  a  touch,  so  easy  a 
mastery  over  his  material.  And,  after  read- 
ing this  minute,  learned,  and  sympathetic 
study  of  le  plus  grand,  le  plus  mysterieux, 
le  plus  troublant  genie  du  xviii*  siecle,  one 
still  finds,  on  turning  to  Pater's  Prince  of 
Court  Painters,  that  all  Watteau  is  there, 
divined,  analysed,  praised  faultlessly,  in  that 
hardly  imaginary  portrait. 

240 


A     PRINCE     OF     COURT     PAINTERS 

Watteau  went  through  life  like  one  al- 
ways in  hiding,  sick,  restless,  distrustful; 
unsatisfied  with  himself  and  with  his  work; 
never  really  at  home  in  the  world.  His 
malady  drove  him  from  place  to  place,  in  an 
unsuccessful  search  after  tranquil  obscurity, 
in  the  incessantly  renewed  hope  of  some 
new  place  in  which  he  could  be  perfectly 
well,  not  distracted  by  friends  or  by  cares, 
alone  with  his  work.  From  his  youth  he 
was  weary  of  most  pleasures,  most  desires; 
always  a  critic,  and  most  of  that  which  he 
cared  most  to  render.  It  was  his  delight 
and  his  labour  to  look  on  at  a  life  which 
was  not  his,  and  in  which  he  did  not  desire 
to  mingle.  He  is  himself  that  melancholy 
spectator  of  pleasures  in  which  he  does  not 
share,  whom  he  has  placed  in  the  corner  of 
so  many  of  his  pictures;  or  I' Indifferent, 
poised  for  the  dance  to  which  he  brings  an 
aged  smile  and  a  joyless  knowledge  of  the 
steps  of  the  measure.  He  creates  the  most 
241 


COLOUR    STUDIES     IN     PARIS 


exquisite  woman  in  modern  painting,  and 
goes  through  life  with  a  careful  withdrawal 
from  too  close  a  contact  with  women.  The 
painter  of  fetes  galantes,  he  is  never  the 
dupe  of  those  sentimental  reveries  in  which 
there  is  no  frank  abandonment  of  the  flesh 
or  spirit.  His  brush  has  both  coquetry  and 
raillery,  and  no  wit  in  paint  was  ever  so 
discreet  in  its  comments  on  life. 

Watteau  is  the  only  painter  of  la  ga- 
lanterie  who  has  given  seriousness  to  the 
elegance  of  that  passing  moment,  who  has 
fixed  that  moment  in  an  attitude  which 
becomes  eternal.  And  he  has  done  so 
alike  by  his  intellectual  conception  of 
life,  of  the  human  comedy,  and  by  the 
distinction,  the  distinguished  skill  of  his 
technique.  For  a  similar  gravity  in  the 
treatment  of  "light"  subjects,  and  for  a 
similar  skill  in  giving  them  beauty  and  dis- 
tinction, we  must  come  down  to  Degas.  For 
Degas  the  ballet  and  the  cafe  replace  the 
242 


A    PRINCE    OF    COURT    PAINTERS 

Italian  comedy  of  masks  and  the  afternoon 
conversation  in  a  park.  But  in  Degas  there 
is  the  same  instantaneous  notation  of  move- 
ment and  the  same  choice  and  strange  richness 
of  colour ;  with  a  quite  comparable  fondness 
for  seizing  what  is  true  in  artificial  life,  and 
what  is  sad  and  serious  in  humanity  at  play. 
But  Watteau,  unlike  Degas,  is  never  cruel. 
He  has  almost  an  envy  of  these  elegant 
creatures,  and  of  their  capacity  for  taking 
no  thought  for  the  morrow;  he,  as  he  gives 
them  immortality,  thinks  sadly  of  the  tempo- 
rary joys.  He  listens  to  the  same  music, 
sees  their  hands  and  lips  join,  and  is  himself 
never  ready  for  that  Embarquement  pour 
Cythere  towards  which  he  sees  them  mov- 
ing. It  is  with  disillusioned,  not  with  mock- 
ing, eyes  that  he  looks  upon  those  to  whom 
the  world  is  still  unspoilt.  Happy  are  those, 
he  seems  to  say,  who  can  be  happy. 

Watteau  was  a  great  lover  of  music,  and 
he  has  placed  instruments  of  music  even  in 
243 


COLOUR    STUDIES    IN     PARIS 


hands  that  do  not  know  how  to  hold  bow 
and  handle.  Like  music,  his  painting  is  a 
sad  gaiety,  and  I  rarely  look  at  his  pictures 
without  receiving  almost  a  musical  sensa- 
tion. It  is  a  music  of  lute  and  clavichord, 
in  which  the  strings  sob  and  the  quills  rustle, 
and  sometimes  one  may  say,  as  Browning 
says  of  Galluppi:  "In  you  come  with  your 
cold  music  till  I  creep  through  every 
nerve." 

There  is  a  certain  chill  in  this  music  of 
the  pictures  which  could  never,  unlike  the 
music  itself,  have  sounded  merry  when 
Gilles  and  Finette  were  alive.  The  colour  of 
Watteau  is  always  the  colour  of  bright 
things  faded,  of  rose-petals  in  the  old  age 
of  roses.  There  is  melancholy  in  the  sub- 
dued grace  of  his  lines,  full  of  active  languor. 
And  in  his  women,  themselves  like  a  deli- 
cate music,  there  is  something  almost  dis- 
quieting, some  of  the  mystery  of  music. 

For  Watteau  a  woman  is  the  most  beauti- 
244 


A  PRINCE  OF  COURT  PAINTERS 

ful  thing  in  the  world;  something  of  a  toy, 
perhaps,  or  an  ornament,  flowers  or  jewels; 
and  her  clothes  must  be  as  beautiful  as  her- 
self. He  paints  what  no  one  else  has 
painted:  a  frisson  made  woman.  But  he 
paints  without  desire,  with  a  kind  of  tender, 
melancholy  respect  for  the  soul  of  the  flesh, 
embodied  in  fine  silks,  fragile,  loving  to  be 
loved.  For  him  she  is  a  bibelot,  not  a 
mistress,  and  he  has  made  her  after  his  own 
heart.  He  paints  her  cheek  and  her  face 
with  the  same  tenderness,  the  same  passion- 
ate ecstasy.  And  he  has  put  into  her  eyes 
not  only  that  dainty  malice  with  which  she 
fights  and  conquers,  but  also  that  dainty 
mystery  with  which  she  attracts  and  retains. 
The  woman  of  Watteau  is  woman  clothed 
and  civilised,  and  in  the  best  society.  Born 
a  mason's  son,  he  had,  all  his  life,  an  in- 
structive aversion  for  la  has  peuple;  the 
people  through  whom  one  must  elbow  one's 
way.  And  his  women,  if  they  are  not  in 
245 


COLOUR     STUDIES    IN     PARIS 

[ 

fancy  dress,  and  playing  romantic  parts,  are 
always  women  who  have  the  leisure  to  be 
beautiful,  to  play  at  life.  The  Frenchwoman 
begins  to  exist  in  his  pictures,  and  he  has 
fixed  a  type,  which  remains  what  most 
Frenchwomen  would  wish  to  be.  These 
piquant,  enigmatical  creatures  have  supreme 
worldly  elegance.  The  suspicion  of  thought 
which  he  has  hinted  at  in  their  swift  eyes 
is  a  reticence  which  would  promise  and  re- 
main free.  They  have  the  mystery  which 
a  woman  has  for  a  man,  because  he  is  a 
man  and  she  a  woman. 

With  Watteau  Flemish  painting  ends  and 
French  painting  begins.  He  was  a  devout 
student  of  Rubens,  and  learnt  from  him 
various  secrets,  a  different  but  not  lesser 
life  of  the  flesh,  a  mere  tempered  but  not 
less  splendid  life  of  the  clothes.  He  adds 
as  much  in  elegance  as  he  omits  in  ampli- 
tude; he  creates  a  new  thing,  which  is 
French.  And  may  it  not  be  said,  with 
246 


A  PRINCE  OF  COURT  PAINTERS 

■■■■■      i  ■  .-in.     -mi      .ii  ■ in 

M.  Josz,  that  he  does  more  than  anyone  has 
yet  done  towards  the  creation  of  English 
painting?  In  that  year  which  he  spent  in 
London,  just  before  his  death,  his  work  had 
an  immediate  and  an  immense  success. 
When  Frederick  the  Great,  twenty  years 
after  his  death,  wanted  to  buy  some  of  his 
pictures,  his  intendant  answered:  "Tous  les 
ouvrages  que  Watteau  a  fait  sont  presque 
tous  en  Angleterre,  ou  on  en  fait  un  cas 
infini."  Holbein,  Rubens,  Vandyke,  had  been 
in  England,  had  painted  there,  been  ad- 
mired; but  it  is  only  after  the  visit  of  Wat- 
teau and  the  sight  of  this  delicacy,  finesse, 
this  clear  and  vaporous  colour,  this  arrest- 
ing of  fine  shades,  this  evocation  of  a  new, 
sensitive,  modern  beauty,  that  the  English 
begin  to  paint;  and  are  there  not  in  the 
work  of  Watteau  qualities  which  anticipate 
Reynolds  and  Gainsborough,  as  there  are 
qualities  which  anticipate  both  Constable 
and  Turner? 
1903. 

247 


ODILON    REDON 


ODILON  REDON 

The  name  of  Odilon  Redon  is  known  to 
but  few  people  in  France,  and  to  still  fewer 
people  in  England.  Artistic  Paris  has  never 
had  time  to  think  of  the  artist  who  lives  so 
quietly  in  her  midst,  working  patiently  at 
the  record  of  his  visions,  by  no  means  dis- 
couraged by  lack  of  appreciation,  but  prob- 
ably tired  of  expecting  it.  Here  and  there 
the  finer  and  more  alert  instinct  of  some 


yc»u^+4 


A  Typical  Signature  of  Odilon  Redon 
251 


COLOUR    STUDIES   IN    PARIS 


man  who  has  himself  brought  new  gifts  to 
his  art — Huysmans,  Mallarme,  Charles 
Morice,  Emile  Hennequin — has  divined 
what  there  is  of  vision  and  creation  in  this 
strange,  grotesque  world  which  surges  only- 
half  out  of  chaos — the  world  of  an  artist 
who  has  seen  day  and  night. 

The  work  of  Odilon  Redon — his  later 
work,  that  which  is  most  characteristic  of 
him — consists  of  a  series  of  lithographic 
albums,  all  published  since  1880;  Dans  le 
Rive,  A  Edgard  Foe,  Les  Origines,  Hom- 
mage  a  Goya,  La  Tentation  de  Saint  An- 
toine,  A  Gustave  Flaubert,  Pieces  Modernes, 
and  Les  Fleurs  de  Mai.  Each  album  con- 
tains from  six  to  ten  plates  in  large  folio, 
printed  on  beau  papier  de  Chine,  without 
text,  often  without  title,  or  with  a  vague 
and  tantalising  legend,  such  as  Au  reveil, 
j'apergus  la  Deesse  de  V Intelligible,  au  profil 
severe  et  dur.  So,  without  an  attempt  to 
conciliate  the  average  intelligence,  without 

252 


ODILON     REDON 


a  word  of  explanation,  without  a  sign  of 
apology  for  troubling  the  brains  of  his 
countrymen,  Odilon  Redon  has  sent  out  al- 
bum after  album.  So  little  effect  have  they 
produced  that  it  has  taken  ten  years  to  sell 
twenty-four  out  of  the  twenty-five  copies 
of  Dans  le  Reve.    "Reste  l'exemplaire." 

Odilon  Redon  is  a  creator  of  nightmares. 
His  sense  for  pure  beauty  is  but  slight,  or 
rather  for  normal  beauty;  for  he  begets 
upon  horror  and  mystery  a  new  and  strange 
kind  of  beauty,  which  astonishes,  which  ter- 
rifies, but  which  is  yet,  in  his  finest  work, 
beauty  all  the  same.  Often  the  work  is  not 
beautiful  at  all:  it  can  be  hideous,  never 
ineffective.  He  is  a  genuine  visionary:  he 
paints  what  he  sees,  and  he  sees  through  a 
window  which  looks  out  upon  a  night  with- 
out stars.  His  imagination  voyages  in 
worlds  not  realised,  voyages  scarcely  con- 
scious of  its  direction.  He  sees  chaos,  which 
peoples  its  gulfs  before  him.  The  abyss 
253 


COLOUR     STUDIES     IN     PARIS 

swarms — toutes  sortes  d'effroyable  betes 
surgissent — animal  and  vegetable  life,  the 
germs  of  things,  a  creation  of  the  uncreated. 
The  world  and  men  become  spectral  under 
his  gaze,  become  transformed  into  symbols, 
into  apparitions,  for  which  he  can  give  no 
account  often  enough.  C'est  une  apparition 
— voila  tout!  He  paints  the  soul  and  its 
dreams,  especially  its  bad  dreams.  He  has 
dedicated  some  of  his  albums  to  Flaubert, 
to  Poe,  to  Baudelaire;  but  their  work  is  to 
him  scarcely  so  much  as  a  starting-point. 
His  imagination  seizes  on  a  word,  a  chance 
phrase,  and  transforms  it  into  a  picture 
which  goes  far  beyond  and  away  from  the 
author's  intention — as  in  the  design  which 
has  for  legend  the  casual  words  of  Poe: 
"L/ceil,  comme  un  ballon  bizarre,  se  dirige 
vers  rinfini."  We  see  an  actual  eye  and  an 
actual  balloon:  the  thing  is  grotesque. 

The  sensation  produced  by  the  work  of 
Odilon  Redon  is,  above  all,  a  sensation  of 

254 


hit     !-  *'■■■"   i         ,i  p 

4#* 


Sketch  of  Odilon  Redon 


ODILON     REDON 


infinitude,  of  a  world  beyond  the  visible. 
Every  picture  is  a  little  corner  of  space, 
where  no  eye  has  ever  pierced.  Vision  suc- 
ceeds vision,  dizzily.  A  cunning  arrangement 
of  lines  gives  one  the  sense  of  something 
without  beginning  or  end:  spiral  coils,  or 
floating  tresses,  which  seem  to  reach  out, 
winding  or  unwinding  for  ever.  And  as  all 
this  has  to  be  done  by  black  and  white, 
Redon  has  come  to  express  more  by  mere 
shadow  than  one  could  have  conceived  pos- 
sible. One  gazes  into  a  mass  of  blackness, 
out  of  which  something  gradually  disen- 
gages itself,  with  the  slowness  of  a  night- 
mare pressing  closer  and  closer.  And,  with 
all  that,  a  charm,  a  sentiment  of  grace, 
which  twines  roses  in  the  hair  of  the  vision 
of  Death.  The  design,  La  Mort,  is  cer- 
tainly his  masterpiece.  The  background  is 
dark;  the  huge  coils  which  terminate  the 
body  are  darker  than  the  background,  and 
plunge  heavily  into  space,  doubling  hugely 
255 


COLOUR  STUDIES  IN  PARIS 


upon  themselves,  coils  of  living  smoke:  yet 
the  effect  of  the  picture  is  one  of  light — a 
terror  which  becomes  beautiful  as  it  passes 
into  irony.  The  death's  head,  the  little 
vague  poverty-stricken  face,  is  white,  faint, 
glimmering  under  the  tendrils  of  hair  and 
roses:  tresses  of  windy  roses  which  stream 
along  and  away  with  an  effect  of  surprising 
charm,  the  lines  running  out  in  delicate 
curves,  to  be  lost  in  the  night.  And  below, 
separated  from  the  head  by  a  blotch  of 
sheer  blackness,  one  sees  a  body,  a  beautiful, 
slender,  supple  body,  glittering  with  a 
strange  acute  whiteness,  with  a  delicate  arm 
raised  to  the  empty  temples  of  the  skull. 
Below,  in  its  frightful  continuation  of  the 
fine  morbid  flesh  of  the  body,  the  black 
column,  the  huge  and  heavy  coils,  which 
seem  endless.  The  legend  is  from  Flaubert. 
Death  speaks,  saying:  Mon  ironie  depasse 
toutes  les  autres. 
Ammonaria  and  he  Spinx  et  la  Chimere 
256 


ODILON     REDON 


are  from  the  same  album,  which  illustrates 
Le  Tent  at  ion  de  Saint  Antoine,  and  are 
characteristic,  though  not  the  finest,  ex- 
amples of  Redon's  work.  The  scene  of 
Ammonaria  is  before  the  temple  of  Serapis, 
at  Alexandria.  It  is  a  Christian  martyr 
whom  they  are  scourging :  she  writhes  under 
the  blows,  in  the  cruel  sunlight:  one  feels 
the  anguish  of  the  bent  and  tortured  figure, 
suffering  visibly.  The  other  design  renders 
that  marvellous  dialogue  between  the  Sphinx 
and  the  Chimera.  "Cest  que  je  garde  mon 
secret!"  says  the  Sphinx.  "Je  songe  et  je 
calcule.  .  .  .  Et  mon  regarde  que  rien  ne 
peut  devier,  demeure  tendu  a  travers  les 
choses  sur  un  horizon  inaccessible.  Moi," 
replies  the  Chimera,  "je  suis  legere  et  joy- 
euse!"  and  it  is  a  veritable  hilarity  that  one 
discovers,  looking  at  it  rightly,  in  the  regard 
of  the  strange  creature:  a  spasm  of  ironic 
laughter  in  the  blots  of  blackness  which  are 
its  eyes,  in  the  mouth  that  one  divines,  in 
257 


COLOUR    STUDIES   IN   PARIS 


the  curl  and  coil  of  the  whole  figure.  In  the 
calm  gaze  and  heavy  placid  pose  of  the 
Sphinx,  lines  of  immeasurable  age  above 
its  eyes,  there  is  a  crushing  force  which 
weighs  on  one  like  a  great  weight,  something 
external.  The  power  of  the  Chimera  is  of 
the  mind  and  over  souls.  Vague,  terrible, 
a  mockery,  a  menace,  it  has  the  vertigo  of 
the  gulf  in  its  eyes,  and  it  draws  men  to- 
ward those  "new  perfumes,  those  larger 
flowers,  those  unfelt  pleasures,"  which  are 
not  to  be  found  in  the  world.  In  another 
design  the  Chimera,  spitting  fire  from  its 
nostrils,  light  glittering  and  leaping  on 
wings  and  tail,  turns  on  itself,  distending  its 
jaws  in  a  vast  ironic  bark:  la  chimere  aux 
verts,  toumoie,  aboie.  More  terrible,  more 
wonderful,  more  disquieting  is  Le  Diable 
avec  les  sept  Peches  cardinaux  sous  ses 
Ailes.  The  design  is  black  upon  black,  and 
it  is  only  slowly  that  a  huge  and  solemn, 
almost  a  maternal  face,  looms  out  upon  one : 
Satan,  placid,  monstrous,  and  winged,  who 
258 


ODILON     REDON 


cradles  softly  the  little  vague  huddled  fig- 
ures of  the  seven  deadly  sins,  holding  them 
in  his  large  hands,  under  the  shadow  of  his 
wings.  And  there  is  another  Satan,  val- 
iantly insurgent  against  the  light  that  strikes 
him,  a  figure  of  superb  power  in  revolt. 
Yet  another  design  shows  us  Pegasus,  his 
beautiful  wing  broken,  a  wing  that  had  felt 
the  high  skies,  falling  horribly  upon  the 
rocks:  all  the  agony  and  resistance  of  the 
splendid  creature  seen  in  the  trampling 
hoofs  and  heaving  sides,  and  the  head  caught 
back  by  the  fall.  Again  one  sees  a  delicate 
twilight  landscape  of  trees  and  birds,  a  bit 
of  lovely  nature,  and  in  it,  with  the  trouble 
of  a  vague  nightmare,  coming  there  inex- 
plicably, Le  Joueur,  a  man  who  holds  on  his 
shoulders  an  immense  cube  painfully:  the 
man  and  the  trees  seem  surprised  to  see 
each  other.  There  is  another  landscape,  a 
primeval  forest,  vague  and  disquieting,  and 
a  solitary  figure,  the  figure  of  a  man  who  is 
half  a  tree,  like  some  forgotten  deity  of  a 
259 


COLOUR  STUDIES   IN   PARIS 


lost  race:  the  forest  and  the  man  are  at  one, 
and  hold  converse.  And  there  are  heads, 
heads  floating  in  space,  growing  on  stalks, 
couched  on  pedestals ;  eyeballs,  which  voyage 
phantasmally  across  the  night,  which  emerge 
out  of  nests  of  fungus,  which  appear,  haloed 
in  light,  in  the  space  of  sky  between  huge 
pillars ;  there  are  spectral  negroes,  there  are 
centaurs,  there  are  gnomes,  a  Cyclops  (with 
the  right  accent  of  terrifying  and  yet  comic 
reality),  embryonic  formless  little  shapes, 
and,  persuasively,  the  Sciapodes  of  Flaubert : 
"La  tete  le  plus  bas  possible,  c'est  le  secret 
du  bonheur!  II  y  doit  avoir  quelque  part," 
says  Flaubert,  "des  figures  primordiales, 
dont  les  corps  ne  sont  que  les  images,"  and 
Redon  has  drawn  them,  done  the  impossible. 
The  Chimera  glides  mystically  through  the 
whole  series.  Death,  the  irony;  Life,  the 
dream ;  Satan,  the  visible  prince  of  darkness, 
pass  and  repass  in  the  eternal  dance  of 
apparitions. 
1903. 

260 


WORKS      OF 

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THE    PURPLE    LAND 

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WITH  A  CRITICAL  APPRECIATION  BY 

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